Anyone want to help?
Nov. 16th, 2005 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeI've written a draft "statement of purpose" for my grad school app. It's supposed to "(A) discuss your main research interests, ideas, and questions; (B) explain how your research experience and professional work so far informs your interest and future goals; and (C) state why you believe the University of Oregon is a good place for you to continue your research (and, if applicable, clinical) training."
Anyone feel like giving feedback? I would appreciate help on both the stragetic and picky-wording-issues levels. It would be nice to figure out how to rewrite the final sentence in a way that doesn't make me snort with laughter and roll my eyes, too.
Draft Statement of Purpose
I'm applying for the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Oregon, with an emphasis on social psychology. The following will discuss three elements of my background and how they all come together in my current educational plan: my undergraduate education, my professional experiences at Oregon Research Institute (ORI), and my personal research projects.
Undergraduate Education
At the University of Oregon as a teenager (1978-1981), and later when finishing my bachelor's degree at U.C. Berkeley (1986-1988), I had a very hard time picking a major. At the UO I majored first in general humanities, then in political science and history, with significant coursework in religious studies and European languages. Although I wasn't able to articulate it back then, my interests did have a common thread: human values, attitudes, and beliefs and their implications for behavior.
When I enrolled at Berkeley, I knew I was particularly interested in human ecology, and I signed up for a major in "conservation and resource studies," but in my second semester I discovered that consciousness-raising and describing problems weren't sufficient for me; I also wanted analytic tools to help evaluate solutions. I then switched majors again and studied microeconomics with applications to natural resources, because economics provides quantitative methods for studying choices. By the time I had completed my degree, though, I was finding economics unsatisfactory as well -- its models assumed more rationality than seemed appropriate to me, because I could see that in their interactions with the environment (as well as health and other fields of interest to me), people make irrational choices all the time. (I wasn't yet aware of Tversky and Kahneman's work to model this irrationality.) I decided I would have to put graduate studies on hold indefinitely, until I found a discipline that would let me address my interests with both sufficient analytic rigor and sufficient attention to the "messiness" of real-world behavior.
Professional Experiences
In 1993, after moving back home to Oregon, I started work with the tobacco cessation researchers at Oregon Research Institute. This has been a wonderful opportunity for me, not only to help many, many people make significant positive changes in their health-related behaviors, but also to explore my own interests, which (typically) have gone in many directions. I've learned quite a bit about tobacco cessation (with special emphasis on smokeless tobacco, for which we've run two of the largest cessation interventions ever conducted). In particular, I've learned that success in quitting tobacco largely depends on how a person represents the task to himself or herself -- for example, as a multi-step process for which one learns and practices a variety of skills, rather than as a feat of willpower.
My favorite parts of working at ORI have been learning about theory and analytical tools. Most of the theory underlying our studies is implicit, but I've been able to study various aspects of social psychology piecemeal, as they've been relevant to our research, such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (self-determination theory), the theory of diffusion of innovations, and the literature on social support.
I've been exposed to several types of analytical tools at ORI. I learned the standard methods for cost-effectiveness analysis of heath interventions and have designed and conducted several cost analyses which have been submitted for publication. After taking the 611-612-613 data analysis sequence at the UO, I then contributed to developing a new scale to measure smokeless tobacco dependence. I helped design the items, performed exploratory factor analyses, and worked with a UO consultant and our project statistician to apply item response theory (IRT) to choose items for the scale, which I've described in posters presented at international conferences. I've also had my own ideas on how to use item response theory as an approach to generating new models of tobacco dependence: Because IRT ranks items by their level of relevance to an underlying trait of interest, it can be inferred that if items assessing one aspect of the trait are associated with a higher level of that trait than items assessing another aspect, presence of that aspect may entail more of that trait. Specifically, our data indicate that people using tobacco for stimulation may be more dependent on tobacco than those using it primarily because withdrawal is uncomfortable, although I am less concerned with advancing this particular hypothesis than I am with promoting the availability of this analytic approach.
I'm committed to remaining at ORI, and I believe that I will be even more effective in my work there when I've completed more education. I would especially like to focus on using our empirical findings to add more to the "big picture" of understanding of the mechanisms underlying behavior change. Analysis is important, and I enjoy it, but I believe it should be complemented by an emphasis on synthesis and theory-building, to consolidate past findings and help generate new ideas. I would like to have a more solid background in psychology and the professional credentials that would let me make these contributions.
Personal Research
Even before I enrolled at Berkeley, I've cultivating pet projects on the relationships between nature and human religion and spirituality. One project (which has been dormant for some time) is on wild nature and pre-Christian religion, intended as an exploration of the psychosocial functions of religion with reference to wilderness and the boundaries between the domesticated world and the Other.
More pressing and relevant, though, is my long-term project on the foundations of environmental thought. Environmental and nature writers typically seek to influence their readers' attitudes, and by extension, their behaviors. Whether attitude change is sufficient to lead to behavior change (in the presence of the substantial infrastructure barriers and competing priorities), and whether widespread individual behavior change is sufficient to produce massive societal change, are both vital questions. However, my attention has been captured by the type of rhetoric eco-writers have generally been using, namely, unconscious appeals to elements of the Christian salvation storyline (encounters with the holy, humanity's fall from grace, a looming apocalypse, the need for salvation, etc.). About 15 years ago, I started a project to document this phenomenon, but I didn't have a framework to explain it until I happened across Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. This got me several steps further, and last June I presented a piece of my research at a conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, where I received a lot of encouragement.
Yet in my efforts to understand why environmental writers would borrow from this other and seemingly unrelated narrative, I discovered that the existing literature in the psychology of persuasion had some significant gaps, as it focuses primarily on the conditions for effortful (central/systemic) vs. casual (peripheral/heuristic) processing of persuasive messages. Not much attention has been paid to interactions with message content, although some researchers have begun looking at the use of metaphors and narratives. I decided I needed a to develop a framework for talking about these questions, and I set aside the larger project to work on it; I've made progress, though my framework still needs considerable refinement.
Graduate Study Objectives
This fall, I've been participating in Gerard Saucier's graduate seminar on worldviews and beliefs, which has been exciting for me because I've been getting to integrate ideas and observations from throughout my academic and professional careers. We're focusing directly on my core interests in values and behavior, and I can see ways that our discussions are relevant to health and the environment, as well as religion, politics, and activism for social change. We've also been oriented towards interdisciplinary synthesis while staying grounded in what can be addressed through empirical research. I would be very interested in contributing to Gerard's work, which is quite compatible with my own interests to date, and I would hope to find practical applications for these ideas in health behavior interventions at ORI.
More broadly, I would like to get a firm grounding in social psychology. I'm interested in Sara Hodges' work in empathy and Paul Slovic's work in risk perception. I also want to learn more about the fundamentals of psychology, espcially cognition and neurobiology. I'd like to study quantitative methods for theory development, such as confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. And as a possible "supporting area," I'd like to learn more about the psychology of rhetoric, which is relevant for addressing problems both at the societal level and for individuals (such as I described above, teaching people trying to quit tobacco new ways to conceptualize the tasks before them). That might involve learning more about modern rhetoric theory (e.g., English 493) and perhaps working with the UO's Mark Johnson, who is studying the interrelationships between language, concepts, and values.
Finally, I would like to attend the university because I am a committed member of the community it serves, and because affiliation with the university is important to me as an Oregonian -- an example of values influencing behavior.
(See what I mean?)
Thanks!
Anyone feel like giving feedback? I would appreciate help on both the stragetic and picky-wording-issues levels. It would be nice to figure out how to rewrite the final sentence in a way that doesn't make me snort with laughter and roll my eyes, too.
Draft Statement of Purpose
I'm applying for the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Oregon, with an emphasis on social psychology. The following will discuss three elements of my background and how they all come together in my current educational plan: my undergraduate education, my professional experiences at Oregon Research Institute (ORI), and my personal research projects.
Undergraduate Education
At the University of Oregon as a teenager (1978-1981), and later when finishing my bachelor's degree at U.C. Berkeley (1986-1988), I had a very hard time picking a major. At the UO I majored first in general humanities, then in political science and history, with significant coursework in religious studies and European languages. Although I wasn't able to articulate it back then, my interests did have a common thread: human values, attitudes, and beliefs and their implications for behavior.
When I enrolled at Berkeley, I knew I was particularly interested in human ecology, and I signed up for a major in "conservation and resource studies," but in my second semester I discovered that consciousness-raising and describing problems weren't sufficient for me; I also wanted analytic tools to help evaluate solutions. I then switched majors again and studied microeconomics with applications to natural resources, because economics provides quantitative methods for studying choices. By the time I had completed my degree, though, I was finding economics unsatisfactory as well -- its models assumed more rationality than seemed appropriate to me, because I could see that in their interactions with the environment (as well as health and other fields of interest to me), people make irrational choices all the time. (I wasn't yet aware of Tversky and Kahneman's work to model this irrationality.) I decided I would have to put graduate studies on hold indefinitely, until I found a discipline that would let me address my interests with both sufficient analytic rigor and sufficient attention to the "messiness" of real-world behavior.
Professional Experiences
In 1993, after moving back home to Oregon, I started work with the tobacco cessation researchers at Oregon Research Institute. This has been a wonderful opportunity for me, not only to help many, many people make significant positive changes in their health-related behaviors, but also to explore my own interests, which (typically) have gone in many directions. I've learned quite a bit about tobacco cessation (with special emphasis on smokeless tobacco, for which we've run two of the largest cessation interventions ever conducted). In particular, I've learned that success in quitting tobacco largely depends on how a person represents the task to himself or herself -- for example, as a multi-step process for which one learns and practices a variety of skills, rather than as a feat of willpower.
My favorite parts of working at ORI have been learning about theory and analytical tools. Most of the theory underlying our studies is implicit, but I've been able to study various aspects of social psychology piecemeal, as they've been relevant to our research, such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (self-determination theory), the theory of diffusion of innovations, and the literature on social support.
I've been exposed to several types of analytical tools at ORI. I learned the standard methods for cost-effectiveness analysis of heath interventions and have designed and conducted several cost analyses which have been submitted for publication. After taking the 611-612-613 data analysis sequence at the UO, I then contributed to developing a new scale to measure smokeless tobacco dependence. I helped design the items, performed exploratory factor analyses, and worked with a UO consultant and our project statistician to apply item response theory (IRT) to choose items for the scale, which I've described in posters presented at international conferences. I've also had my own ideas on how to use item response theory as an approach to generating new models of tobacco dependence: Because IRT ranks items by their level of relevance to an underlying trait of interest, it can be inferred that if items assessing one aspect of the trait are associated with a higher level of that trait than items assessing another aspect, presence of that aspect may entail more of that trait. Specifically, our data indicate that people using tobacco for stimulation may be more dependent on tobacco than those using it primarily because withdrawal is uncomfortable, although I am less concerned with advancing this particular hypothesis than I am with promoting the availability of this analytic approach.
I'm committed to remaining at ORI, and I believe that I will be even more effective in my work there when I've completed more education. I would especially like to focus on using our empirical findings to add more to the "big picture" of understanding of the mechanisms underlying behavior change. Analysis is important, and I enjoy it, but I believe it should be complemented by an emphasis on synthesis and theory-building, to consolidate past findings and help generate new ideas. I would like to have a more solid background in psychology and the professional credentials that would let me make these contributions.
Personal Research
Even before I enrolled at Berkeley, I've cultivating pet projects on the relationships between nature and human religion and spirituality. One project (which has been dormant for some time) is on wild nature and pre-Christian religion, intended as an exploration of the psychosocial functions of religion with reference to wilderness and the boundaries between the domesticated world and the Other.
More pressing and relevant, though, is my long-term project on the foundations of environmental thought. Environmental and nature writers typically seek to influence their readers' attitudes, and by extension, their behaviors. Whether attitude change is sufficient to lead to behavior change (in the presence of the substantial infrastructure barriers and competing priorities), and whether widespread individual behavior change is sufficient to produce massive societal change, are both vital questions. However, my attention has been captured by the type of rhetoric eco-writers have generally been using, namely, unconscious appeals to elements of the Christian salvation storyline (encounters with the holy, humanity's fall from grace, a looming apocalypse, the need for salvation, etc.). About 15 years ago, I started a project to document this phenomenon, but I didn't have a framework to explain it until I happened across Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. This got me several steps further, and last June I presented a piece of my research at a conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, where I received a lot of encouragement.
Yet in my efforts to understand why environmental writers would borrow from this other and seemingly unrelated narrative, I discovered that the existing literature in the psychology of persuasion had some significant gaps, as it focuses primarily on the conditions for effortful (central/systemic) vs. casual (peripheral/heuristic) processing of persuasive messages. Not much attention has been paid to interactions with message content, although some researchers have begun looking at the use of metaphors and narratives. I decided I needed a to develop a framework for talking about these questions, and I set aside the larger project to work on it; I've made progress, though my framework still needs considerable refinement.
Graduate Study Objectives
This fall, I've been participating in Gerard Saucier's graduate seminar on worldviews and beliefs, which has been exciting for me because I've been getting to integrate ideas and observations from throughout my academic and professional careers. We're focusing directly on my core interests in values and behavior, and I can see ways that our discussions are relevant to health and the environment, as well as religion, politics, and activism for social change. We've also been oriented towards interdisciplinary synthesis while staying grounded in what can be addressed through empirical research. I would be very interested in contributing to Gerard's work, which is quite compatible with my own interests to date, and I would hope to find practical applications for these ideas in health behavior interventions at ORI.
More broadly, I would like to get a firm grounding in social psychology. I'm interested in Sara Hodges' work in empathy and Paul Slovic's work in risk perception. I also want to learn more about the fundamentals of psychology, espcially cognition and neurobiology. I'd like to study quantitative methods for theory development, such as confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. And as a possible "supporting area," I'd like to learn more about the psychology of rhetoric, which is relevant for addressing problems both at the societal level and for individuals (such as I described above, teaching people trying to quit tobacco new ways to conceptualize the tasks before them). That might involve learning more about modern rhetoric theory (e.g., English 493) and perhaps working with the UO's Mark Johnson, who is studying the interrelationships between language, concepts, and values.
Finally, I would like to attend the university because I am a committed member of the community it serves, and because affiliation with the university is important to me as an Oregonian -- an example of values influencing behavior.
(See what I mean?)
Thanks!