Mentor: Dr. Joanne Chung
Project Description
Daily diary and experience sampling studies have provided exciting insights into how people experience positive and negative affect in everyday life. Yet, people appear to experience and speak of a more varied range of emotions in relation to the different situations they encounter from moment to moment. Existing research has focused largely on samples of people who are fluent in English and are from North America. In this project, we will explore the structure of self-reported emotional experiences in everyday life using data reported in Arabic from a sample of Syrian-origin young adults who have recently resettled in the Netherlands (N = 168). We will use different factor analytic approaches both at the within-person and between-person levels to analyze intensive longitudinal data collected over 4 waves of data collection spanning 13 months. We will also examine participants’ open-ended reflections on this task to help us understand our quantitative findings. This project will contribute to the literature by providing initial insights into the structure of emotional experiences of Syrian-origin youth in the Netherlands, and may help us improve assessment of emotions in similar samples in the future. You will take a deep dive into data wrangling in R and gain experience in factor analysis. You will be expected to write up the results in plain language and offer measured interpretations that include constraints on generality. You will also be expected to register your analytic plan on the Open Science Framework and record any deviations from this registration.
Mentorship Statement
I value learning together and being in community with my students. I tend to work well with people who are open-minded, patient with the scientific process, and okay with being wrong sometimes. I encourage my mentees to bring their lived experiences to their academic endeavors, and take a personalized approach to my mentoring relationships. We will have one-on-one meetings, which will be supplemented with an occasional lab meeting. You will gain familiarity with literature focused on personality development, emotions, and culture. You will learn about open science practices, psychological measurement, and longitudinal data analysis.
I am a Korean American personality psychologist, and as an underrepresented minority in the academy, I strongly support the mission of SROP. For example, I strive to include people who are underrepresented in the psychological literature in my research team and as the focus of my research because I believe that psychology absolutely needs more diversity.