I have led and participated in over 7 research projects, intersecting cognitive psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology, cultural psychology, policy, and medicine. Therefore, I have ample experiences in a variety of topics, research methods, and analytic approaches.
Idea Conceptualization and Operationalization
- Define research questions and objectives
- Review literature, refine research questions, and generate hypotheses
- Select appropriate research methods and measures to achieve research objectives
Research Methods
- Survey research
- Use best practices to design, pre-test, and implement surveys in paper and pencil and on Qualtrics via platforms, such as Mturk and Turkprime
- Integrate qualitative findings into survey design
- Ensure data quality with manipulation and attention checks
- In-person experiment
- Design feasible experiments
- Train research assistants as experimenters
- Individual interview
- Write interview questions
- Conduct semi-structured and structured interviews of college students, caregivers, and physicians
- User-centered design
- Write interview guide and think aloud protocol
- Conduct interviews and elicit feedback
- Revise prototype product using users’ feedback
- Secondary analysis
- Understand the data and measures
- Identify research questions from existing data
- Randomized controlled trial (RCT)
- Have knowledge about principles of designing a feasibility trial and RCT
- Have knowledge about the CONSORT and protocol papers
Participant Recruitment
- Recruit college students, Turkprime/Mturk participants, as well as special populations (e.g., parents of critically ill children) through email list, flyers, clinic visits, etc.
Analytical Approaches
- Quantitative: Conduct statistical analyses in SAS (primarily), SPSS, Excel.
- Qualitative: Use thematic analysis (Bruan & Clark, 2006) to analyze open-ended responses and content analysis (e.g., Morse & Field, 2005) to analyze interview transcripts.
Project Management
I have mentored more than 30 undergraduate research assistants during my graduate career. I trained research assistants on all essential aspects of psychology research, including literature review, survey design and construction, data collection, data analysis, and writing.
I wrote a handbook called Accelerated Research Training Guide (ART Guide), which contains step-by-step guidelines for common psychology research tasks that aims to ensure high-quality work even by novices. I also provided a writing schedule and instructions for my students to complete the final paper requirement. Traditionally, new researchers have learned concrete research techniques almost solely through the apprenticeship approach, under the immediate guidance of advisors and experienced peers. However, such learning by doing is often inefficient and risky. Psychology research these days requires careful experimental design and coordination between researcher, administrators, and participants, yielding a process that is highly susceptible to procedural errors that result in costly delays. Therefore, I decided to create transparent and readily accessible experience sharing practices that reduce instructional burden and facilitate learning.