Social and Personality Research Team

Research Team 11
Supervised by
Leigh Ann Vaughn
Office: 115-A Williams

Website: click here

Prof. Vaughn is happy to talk with you about her team for fall 2024.

Research questions for fall 2024 include:

  • When do people want looser or tighter norms?
  • What do people look for in a romantic partner?
  • How well do research findings replicate at Ithaca College and around the world? (Our team is part of an international research replicability project with more than 360 collaborating institutions.)

The idea of doing research might seem intimidating, but the way we do it on this team makes it fun and not as hard as you might expect. Working together makes our research fun. Students have a lot of voice in the design of the studies, and we all work together in troubleshooting them. We analyze data together, figure out what results mean, and write up results to present at professional conferences.

The work outside of class is highly consistent week to week, and takes 3-4 hours per week. Almost every week, students run a research session in a lab, recruit for research participants, read an assigned research article, and do 1-2 short writing assignments. These activities build research skills that are great for graduate school, including literature review, working closely with others on research, writing in APA style, and analyzing data using SPSS.

Every year, we present our work at the Annual Convention of the Eastern Psychological Association and other professional conferences. In the past 10 years, over 90 of my research team students and I have co-authored and presented over 30 posters at professional conferences.

For more information, click here.