Young adults endorse more individualistic and internal adulthood milestones compared to prior generations. Arnett (1994) introduced the Markers of Adulthood (MoA) scale to capture this shift in the ...transition to adulthood using 38 markers associated with becoming an adult, including marriage, having children, and living independently. These items were based on psychological, anthropological, and sociological determinations concerning adulthood, and were arranged into subscales based on their theoretical association rather than statistical analysis. Since the scale was introduced, researchers have addressed crucial questions about the validity of the MoA scale’s milestones. A recurring theme was identifying items that could be sorted into reliable subscales. We examined a collection of original items and included new ones, such as “have a professional social media account” and “recognize personal capabilities and shortcomings” to configure a revised MoA model. A total of 861 participants in seven national locations responded to a demographic survey, the Inventory of the Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood (IDEA; Reifman, et al., 2007), and a collection of MoA items. We conducted a principal component analysis to identify 22 items and four factors (role transitions, independence, legality markers, and relative maturity) which represented 55% of the total variance in the dataset. All factors except legality markers were identified by prior researchers. While four factors demonstrated the best fit for subscale configurations, the revised MoA was considered most reliable when used in its entirety. Our examination ends with a discussion of future directions for configuring items which may produce reliable subscales.
The university participant pool is a key resource for behavioral research, and data quality is believed to vary over the course of the academic semester. This crowdsourced project examined time of ...semester variation in 10 known effects, 10 individual differences, and 3 data quality indicators over the course of the academic semester in 20 participant pools (N=2696) and with an online sample (N=737). Weak time of semester effects were observed on data quality indicators, participant sex, and a few individual differences—conscientiousness, mood, and stress. However, there was little evidence for time of semester qualifying experimental or correlational effects. The generality of this evidence is unknown because only a subset of the tested effects demonstrated evidence for the original result in the whole sample. Mean characteristics of pool samples change slightly during the semester, but these data suggest that those changes are mostly irrelevant for detecting effects.
This article briefly introduces and provides commentary on this special issue, "Investigating How Individuals Feel Ostracizing Others" in the Journal of Social Psychology. This commentary uses ...first-person recollections from early ostracism studies to help frame the special issue in the larger scope of ostracism research. Modern ostracism research started in the early 1990s and hundreds of studies have advanced our understanding of this phenomenon. However, the preponderance of research has focused on the target of ostracism (those being ostracized) and relied primarily on a single method in experimental studies. The present special issue includes articles that employed a variety of research approaches and focused exclusively on the sources (those who do the ostracism). Finally, this commentary invites researchers to more fully investigate this understudied aspect of a common phenomenon that people are likely to engage in regularly.
The coronavirus outbreak manifested in Norway in March 2020. It was met with a combination of mandatory changes (closing of public institutions) and recommended changes (hygiene behavior, physical ...distancing). It has been emphasized that health-protective behavior such as increased hygiene or physical distancing are able to slow the spread of infections and
. Drawing on previous health-psychological studies during the outbreak of various pandemics, we investigated psychological and demographic factors predicting the adoption and engagement in health-protective behavior and changes in such behavior, attitudes, and emotions over time. We recruited a non-representative sample of Norwegians (
= 8676) during a 15-day period (March 12-26 2020) at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Norway. Employing both traditional methods and exploratory machine learning, we replicated earlier findings that engagement in health-protective behavior is associated with specific demographic characteristics. Further, we observed that increased media exposure, perceiving measures as effective, and perceiving the outbreak as serious was positively related to engagement in health-protective behavior. We also found indications that hygiene and physical distancing behaviors were related to somewhat different psychological and demographic factors. Over the sampling period, reported engagement in physical distancing increased, while experienced concern or fear declined. Contrary to previous studies, we found no or only small positive predictions by confidence in authorities, knowledge about the outbreak, and perceived individual risk, while all of those variables were rather high. These findings provide guidance for health communications or interventions targeting the adoption of health-protective behaviors in order to diminish the spread of COVID-19.
Open science initiatives, which are often collaborative efforts focused on making research more transparent, have experienced increasing popularity in the past decade. Open science principles of ...openness and transparency provide opportunities to advance diversity, justice, and sustainability by promoting diverse, just, and sustainable outcomes among both undergraduate and senior researchers. We review models that demonstrate the importance of greater diversity, justice, and sustainability in psychological science before describing how open science initiatives promote these values. Open science initiatives also promote diversity, justice, and sustainability through increased levels of inclusion and access, equitable distribution of opportunities and dissemination of knowledge, and increased sustainability stemming from increased generalizability. In order to provide an application of the concepts discussed, we offer a set of diversity, justice, and sustainability lens questions for individuals to use while assessing research projects and other organizational systems and consider concrete classroom applications for these initiatives.
This article introduces the special issue on the national Emerging Adulthood Measured at Multiple Institutions data set, its historical background and methodology, and the articles appearing herein. ...The project aimed to test associations between markers/processes of the transition to adulthood and political attitudes/behaviors, in conjunction with the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Measures in other areas (e.g., psychological health, disability, and media usage) were also assessed. A total of 1,353 respondents (nearly all in the emerging-adulthood age range) participated through 1 of 10 university-based sites across the United States, with students in undergraduate statistics and research methods courses gathering the data. The resulting data set has allowed social scientists to test formulations involving emerging adulthood in new domains, as presented in this issue, and will allow future investigators to do so. The project also dovetails with parallel developments in the promotion of undergraduate research as a source of substantive scientific contributions.
Psychology majors typically conduct at least one research project during their undergraduate studies, yet these projects rarely make a scientific contribution beyond the classroom. In this study, we ...explored one potential reason for this—that student projects may not be aligned with best practices in the field. In other words, we wondered if there was a mismatch between what instructors teach in principle and what student projects are in practice. To answer this, we asked psychology instructors (n = 111) who regularly teach courses involving research projects questions about these projects. Instructors endorsed many of the commonly assumed pitfalls of student projects, such as not using rigorous methodology. Notably, the characteristics of these typical student projects did not align with the qualities instructors reported as being important in research practice. We highlight opportunities to align these qualities by employing resources such as crowdsourced projects specifically developed for student researchers.
Ecology of rapport and its perception within 2 contexts (i.e., adversarial and cooperative) were examined from a Brunswikian perspective. A lens model analysis determined (a) which observable cues ...were indicative of rapport, (b) whether observer judgments covaried with such cues, and (c) whether observers could assess accurately the rapport between opposite-sex interactants. Whereas the manifestation of rapport was context specific, judgment policies used by observers were not. Rapport judgments were driven by target expressivity regardless of social context. Results suggest an "expressivity halo" in behavioral stream judgments that is analogous to the physical attractiveness halo found in judgments made from still photos. Finally, social perception accuracy was higher in the cooperative context where rapport was more strongly associated with target expressivity.
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