The saga continues. In this episode we talk about the data management steps you’ll need to consider after you’ve collected your data. We talk a lot about data entry, including the science of how to do it well. We also discuss data merging, data cleaning, and the concept of “release” datasets. Finally, because it seems no episode is complete without Sara discovering something to be shocked about regarding Jess’s approach to science, we talk about the importance of backing up your...

You might think “data management” is just getting data ready to share, but it’s so much more. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about the expanded universe of data management. This is the first of a two part series, and focuses on some of the things you can do to help ensure you have good quality data before you even talk to a single participant. We talk about lots of fun data management tips and tricks, from creating research protocols, assigning IDs, creating variable names, variable...

Turnabout is fair play in this episode as now Sara describes her new paper! Some developmental science research is focused on how the home environment is correlated (or co-occurs with) children’s skills, behaviors, or abilities. Sara explains that these correlations are also influenced by the shared genes between parents and their children, and that the genetic correlation may be inflating the true environmental correlation that scientists are seeking to measure. In this episode, she...

New Paper Alert! Jess and her colleagues have a paper in review about a particular statistical method that we see a lot in developmental science. Have you ever run a confirmatory factor analysis and then saved (or extracted) the factor scores, turning them into observed scores for use in another analysis? If you have more than one latent factor, the default method for extracting factor scores can have some unintended consequences on the correlations between those newly created observed...

To celebrate hitting our 10,000 listens benchmark, Jess and Sara spend episode 10 discussing two listener questions. First, we talk about the decision to change or not to change your last name when you get married. It’s something many developmental scientists struggle with, and we talk about how (even though it feels unique) it’s not terribly different from other professions. Second, we discuss that overwhelming feeling you sometimes get when you’re trying to manage your research pipeline,...

Are you open-science curious? Ready to turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes happening in our field? Preprints are one of the most accessible steps in learning about, and might we even suggest embracing open science. To post a preprint, you put a digital copy of a completed paper online, somewhere others can read it.  In this episode, we discuss the advantages of preprints, different ways to post them, and address some of the potential barriers and common fears we hear from other scholars...

Jess and Sara are both advocates for interdisciplinary science, and interdisciplinary science means collaborations! On this episode, we talk about why we love interdisciplinary science and why some departments would prefer a more focused line of research. We also talk about the life cycle of collaborations, how we start them, maintain them, and let them go. Links from this episode: The Hidden Curriculum book Sara mentioned: A Field Guide to Grad School The book Jess mentioned: Structure of...

New year, new goals! Goal setting helps keep you on task, helps you work towards bigger goals, and can help you feel more successful. But many of us really struggle with it (cough cough Jess cough cough). Sara walks us through the goal setting system she uses, how it differs by career stage. We talk about specifics including what to include in your long term goals (hint, only the things you can control), and how to set up a semester spreadsheet. In this episode: An example of Dr. Esther...

For the end of 2020, we asked our listeners to name a few of their favorite things - favorite things about being a developmental scientist, that is. Our unscientific analysis of themes includes: Developmental scientists can translate our work into other fields, it’s very applicable to our parent friends, that the methods we use are creative and complex, and that working with kids is a blast (they say the darndest things). Jess and Sara discuss the submissions we received, and talk about a few...

What does it mean to have a lab, and who is part of it? In this episode, Jess and Sara describe their experiences with different lab setups and structures, and how they manage their meetings with students, projects, and collaborators. We discover that Sara has been using a lab management and productivity tool secretly for years! Our systems for working with our labs, projects, and students are always changing, and Sara might be a bit too addicted with trying to find the best...

As the semester draws to a close, Jess wakes up in the middle of the night concerned not with completing her grading, but with measuring inter-rater reliability for coding schemes. Reliability can refer to the agreement among raters, or agreement among items. There’s a lot of online discourse right now around reliability, but most of it is focused around the former: agreement among items. Over here in the field of developmental science, we’re often coding human behavior through observations,...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic in 2020 must be in want of an online presence. Jess and Sara describe why you need to be online, and their experiences with social media, professional networks, and creating websites (and that twitch isn’t just what happens to Jess’s eye after 6 straight hours on zoom calls). The episode ends with our top three suggestions for how to get involved online. Links from this episode: Jess’ tumblr blog Introductory tutorial on how to use...

To be or not to be (a parent!) that is the question. One of our listeners reached out with a question about timing of starting a family during an academic career. Jess and Sara both describe their respective experiences with having children, how quickly they got back to work, and the pros and cons of the academic work-life balance. Resources: In case you don’t know what yeet means either. Thanks to listener Emily Bibby for the episode idea! Connect with the podcast on...

In which we welcome you back to a new season of the podcast. Jess and Sara catch up on pandemic work and life. We describe the subtle and sometimes not so subtle feeling of being underwater that seems to accompany this particular time, describe how our online teaching is going, and discuss the different ways we’re translating and incorporating anti-racism into our courses. Resources: Many analyst paper Jess mentioned. Paper Sara mentioned about how when you measure something can change your...

Did you miss us? Just a small teaser of Season 2! First full episode is out November 18!!

Jess and Sara get a bit meta this week (some things never change), and discuss why academia is even a job. We walk through a fun and nerdy thought experiment: Is the Curriculum Vita a list of manifest variable indicators of some sort of latent variable of academia?  We discuss when and how we decide to leave a project lost in the woods. And think, for the first time in forever, about a project that we had both abandoned and almost forgotten about. Here’s the “Ginther report” Sara talked...

There’s a close link between the concepts of Perfection and Impostor Syndrome, perhaps mediated (or moderated?) by experiences of rejection. In this episode, we discuss that link, and personify it as Sara helps Jess try to cope with rejection and encourages her to get some rejected manuscripts back under review*. Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at [email protected]. More episodes and podcast information at...

In this episode we talk about rejections - paper rejections. Jess and Sara describe their emotional and not so emotional reactions to finding out whether a paper has been rejected, offered a revise and resubmit, or accepted. We also discuss how much we change a rejected manuscript before we send it elsewhere, how to craft a revision letter, and the urban legend of  papers accepted on the first submission. Resources: The blog post mentioned which discusses a different way to revise and...

In this episode, we revisit how we’re working during COVID. Topics include excellent desk space (Sara) or lack thereof (Jess), and how we are and are not balancing parenting and working at the same time. We also talk about preparing to teach at a distance, and whether we’re even allowed back on campus. Resources: Vijay Sathy - On who benefits from a flipped classroom and how to make your teaching more inclusive. And Flower Darby on how to make virtual teaching more inclusive and connecting...

Peer review is, for now, an essential part of the scientific process. Writing a good peer review is not easy, and we feel it’s rarely formally taught. We get no feedback on the process, so it’s difficult to learn. Listen to Jess and Sara talk about how they decide when to say yes to a review (and when to say no), how to schedule them into your work week so you don’t lose track, and what your job is as the reviewer. We also give some suggestions on how to get started reviewing, and how to ask...

Grant information continues! This time from the reviewing side. Jess and Sara talk about the process of reviewing grants for the big three US federal agencies. The grant reviewing process is an elaborate, multi-step process, which we will outline and discuss. Listen to this if you’re curious what kinds of things your reviewers are doing when they get a stack of grants to review, or if you’re new to serving on a grant panel and want a preview into what it’s like to be in the room.  Resources...

Writing is one of the loneliest activities. For some of us, it can be hard to keep yourself accountable, especially right now with not much of a regular schedule and lots of working from home. On this episode we talk about our paper writing process, how we go from an idea to a submission, and the wonders of co-writing. We are divided on the use of the phrase “dot-jot notes”, which google says is NOT a Canadian only thing. Resources: The Writing Workshop book - Barbara Sarnecka, Bird by Bird...

It’s grant season! In this episode Jess and Sara talk about the way they approach writing grants. There are many different kinds of grants, so in this first grant-focused episode we briefly discuss the different funders for developmental science research, how to choose a grant mechanism to apply for, the general rules and process that we follow for any grant, and the critical role of ice cream. Resources mentioned in this episode: Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has their own webinar...

Now required by most funding agencies, data sharing is gaining some traction in developmental science. Jess and Sara happen to love data sharing, but acknowledge that others may be more hesitant. In this episode we dive into some information about how to data share, and why if you try it, you may find out you love it too. We mentioned a few data repositories, here are ICPSR, RE3Data, Databrary, and LDbase (the repository Sara is building), all of which have data relevant to developmental...

This week, we tackle the history of racism in our specific developmental science fields. We believe that Black Lives Matter. We believe it’s our job to do the anti-racist work within our own departments and fields. In thinking about actionable steps we can each take to work be anti-racist in the academy, we first acknowledge that we are two white women who can not speak to the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and People of Color in the academy. See the rest of the show notes for...