4th Year Psychology, Honours, Directed Studies
By: Maheep Chawla, Akshara Rajeshkannan
Ak: Could you tell us where you’re from?
A: I’m from here, born and raised in Vancouver. I’m in my 4th year in the BA psych honours program.
Ak: What are your preferred pronouns?
A: She/her/hers
Ak: Tell us one fun fact about yourself:
A: I sing in the Vancouver Youth Choir, and I’ve been singing in choirs since I was young.
MC: So I understand you’ve completed your first thesis, and are now working on your second one, as well as a DS project. Can you give us a short overview of your first honours research thesis? Starting off with what your research topic was?
A: It was a slice of a larger project from Dr. Tony Schmader’s lab. I worked with Kate Block, who just finished her PhD, but she’s been working on this project for about five years now.
The data was collected from across 47 countries. Our research focused on communal values and HEED careers. HEED stands for healthcare, early education and domestic careers. It can be conceptualized as the opposite of STEM careers. Some examples of HEED professions would be nurses, teachers, and caretakers.
So we had data stating that in most of these countries people in HEED careers are paid less than people in STEM careers. We wanted to know why. Our first hypothesis was in countries where HEED careers are overrepresented by women, people would not be very supportive of increasing the pay to the level of STEM careers. Our second hypothesis was countries which valued communal values would be more supportive of increasing pay. Our third and final hypothesis was collectivistic countries as a whole would be more supportive of increasing HEED pay.
We found that none of our three hypotheses were true actually! What did predict support for pay equality were egalitarian values. So countries that were more egalitarian supported paying nurses and teachers more and countries that were less egalitarian were not so cool about it! That sums it up basically.
MC: What about your second honours thesis, the one you’re working on this year?
A: So since I’m still working on it, there are no results unfortunately. What I am looking at in this study is perfectionism and narcissism in children. So in brief, perfectionism is a multidimensional trait – there are ways in which people behave or interact with other people and then there’s also a cognitive aspect. In brief, I’m looking more at perfectionistic self-presentation styles, which basically describes how a perfectionistic individual interacts with the world. Someone with perfectionism may try to promote their perfection, or actively try to hide it. We think that there are certain presentation styles in children that correlate with narcissism scores.
MC: Could you also give us a short overview of your current DS project?
A: So this time we’re looking at the effect of COVID on people’s values, using a similar data set as the first study, except with a different hypothesis. Since the onset of COVID, we want to know if people’s communal values have changed (we are assuming they have, and predicting that it will be a moderator for the outcome variables). Since nurses have been given a lot more attention during this time, we want to look into whether people will support equal pay between HEED and STEM careers now, and also their personal interest in HEED careers.
MC: Could you maybe tell us about your relationship with Dr. Schmader, since you’ve engaged in a project with her in the past as well as right now? Why did you feel like she was the professor you wanted to work with for a second time?
A: I was a second year student when I first applied to be a Research Assistant. I had applied to the Schmader lab and I got in, so I spent a year running experiments and it was fun and interesting!
During this time I worked with Kate very closely — she was the grad student at the time — and I still work with her. At the end of the year, she said she really liked working with me and asked if I wanted to do a directed studies research project the following year. Since I had applied for the honors program, we ended up doing that together and formed a good relationship and rapport.
I also really like Schmader lab because it has a very inviting environment. (plus we always had food at our lab meetings!)
MC: What sparked your interest in your research topics?
A: For my first thesis, Kate presented me with a bunch of options. She warned me that this project would be tough but I was completely on board with it!
For my second thesis, I am personally really interested in personality dysfunction, especially personality disorders like narcissism, psychopathy, and perfectionism, which is not a personality disorder, per se, but it is a dysfunction. When I was young, I liked looking at personality, especially personality quizzes! I would read about dark personality traits, like psychopathy, narcissism, machiavellianism. I wanted to know more about it and when I hit high school and university, I was offered the chance to study it in abnormal psychology, where we talked about personality disorders and I thought “this is so cool!” I really wanted to do more work on it so I spoke to my professor and TA about joining the lab. When I joined Dr. Paul Hewitt’s lab, I knew that I wanted to look at how perfectionism intersects with personality disorders.
MC: Is there anyone who inspired you?
A: Dr. Paul Hewitt and Ariel Ko (my supervisor). I want to be able to come up with theories and designs the way they do. Dr. Hewitt made major contributions to his field when he was only an undergraduate student. I want to be able to make a difference in my field in the same way.
Ak: What has been your favourite part of the research process throughout your various projects?
A: My favourite part of the research process is so strange, but I love looking at the literature I’ve compiled and starting to put it into an actual paper. I collect citations and write notes, and it’s a huge mess of not connected information. I love being able to take that literature search and put it into an actual introduction or write up. It feels like my research ideas are finally coming together, and once I write things down and consolidate it, everything starts to make sense. Then I can start to think of other things, like how to analyse my research. Without the support of what I’ve already found, the results don’t have anything to stand against.
Ak: Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
A: I kind of alluded to this earlier. None of my hypotheses were significant, which is fine. It’s a 3rd year thesis, and no one is expecting it to be very publishable. But we found that, for example, there was no correlation between how many women were employed in stereotypically “female” jobs and whether people supported pay equality. Neither were the extent to which people endorsed communal values or country-level collectivism scores. What we did find was egalitarian values (which include thinking that everyone should have equal rights) has to do with paying people equally. Unfortunately we were a bit limited in our analysis because we didn’t have access to actual pay figures. A lot of countries don’t release that info, so we only had access to people’s perception of pay, which we collected with prompts like,“We should encourage paying just as much to nurses, social workers, and teachers as to engineers and computer programmers” We also looked to see whether a country’s GDP affected the opinions of people, but egalitarianism was still the one value that stood out the most.
We need a lot more work in this field though, because I think it’s really important to understand why really important careers like nursing are paid less. A nursing and a CS degree require the same amount of years at university, and yet the average salary for a CS major is on average $40,000 more in the US.
Ak: What was your most surprising observation from your study?
A: The most surprising one was that communal values were not related on the country level, because on an individual level (before aggregating the scores into country averages), communal values directly predict HEED interest. For example, if someone were to support communal values more, this would, on an individual level, predict their level of support for equal pay. But why is it that this correlation is gone on the country level?
Ak: Were you able to come up with possible explanations for that?
A: For the most part, we don’t know why this is the case. One suggestion is that perhaps on the country-level, the effect of communal values are lessened because other values like egalitarianism take precedence.
Ak: Have you had the chance to compare your results with existing literature?
A: The tricky thing is, the results exist on a smaller scale. There are studies looking at communal values and HEED, but mostly within a much smaller population. In the past, it has been hard to conduct such a large study with so many countries involved. This data took years to collect because Kate and her team had to recruit and coordinate with different collaborators. On such a scale, nothing really exists yet. But hopefully people get more into doing cross-country research.
Ak: Now that your first thesis is done, what will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
A: Like with everyone else in the Honours program, I was expected to present my results at PURC, but of course with COVID and everything, that didn’t happen. But I submitted my abstract back in November for MURC, and I did end up presenting my results with them. I came in 2nd place for the poster presentation! That’s the extent of it presentation-wise, I didn’t submit my manuscript anywhere because it was too long and I didn’t want to shorten it (it was about 30 pages long). We didn’t end up sending it to any other journals because we’re hoping to get better results as well.
MC: How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
A: I will talk about the first study since that is the only one that has been completed. In order to advocate for professionals working in HEED careers, we must understand what influences people to be against equal pay between HEED and STEM careers. We are hoping that this research will be able to help us with that. When I was in high school, my teachers would go on strike so often because they were not given a raise in years. I was really bothered by that. Similarly with nurses, their job is to literally keep patients alive after surgery! So yeah, in order to advocate for their rights, we must fully understand the situation first, which we hope these results will help us do.
MC: If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
A: I would probably change two things related to the data if I could. Firstly, instead of simply collecting data in which participants were asked if they support increased pay for nurses, I would have liked to use actual figures, so for example, giving the current salary and giving a potential salary after increase and then asking the participants if they support this specific increase. Secondly, I think having a gender breakdown of what percentage of males and females are working in each career would have been helpful to inform participants while they were answering the survey questions, since many people are unaware of the actual figures. Did you know that only 3 percent of preschool teachers are men?! I think these modifications would have given us better operational variables.
MC: How has the experience you gained from your completed project helping you with your current projects?
A: The structures of both my theses were vastly different, but beyond that, the social psychology thesis has helped me grow into a better researcher for the clinical psychology thesis. Although they’re both psychology theses, the methods that I would use and the rationale for my hypotheses are quite different. I’m in the process of trying to translate my experience for social psychology into clinical research, which is sometimes more theory-based.
Ak: What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
A: I want to say one that was really helpful was Cultural Psychology (PSYC307) by Ben. Part of the reason is because Ben is a great professor and I want to learn everything he teaches, but also, it was because it was directly related to many concepts that were part of my research project. And because I had taken 307, I knew the general gist of what the research was about when I first joined the project. For my current thesis, Abnormal psychology was really useful, especially because my supervisor Paul teaches that class. I also thought learning about social aspects of personality dysfunction in Personality psychology (PSYC305) was really helpful, just because I’m really interested in pursuing that field.
MC: How has being in both the honours and directed studies programs helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
A: Personally, time management. Since I was juggling two projects, I had to understand the intricacies of both. It was especially hard to do that with COVID but I think this project taught me how to procrastinate a tiny bit less! Professionally, being given the opportunity to explore different ways of doing research has helped me grow. Each of my projects have been different from each other in terms of research methodologies and the research questions, which really forced me to venture out of my comfort zone at times. But now I have a variety of research experience, and have a better understanding of research as a whole.
MC: Tell us about how you stay organised and manage your time while doing a directed studies project. How do you prioritise? How do you motivate yourself?
A: I love talking about this. This is my baby right here! *pulls out a journal* I have been using this my whole university life. I buy the same agenda journal every year and I plan my days out as meticulously as possible. I write down my to-do tasks from meetings to readings to even vacuuming! Once I complete the task, I cross it out. It is so satisfying to cross out a task after it is completed. I think that’s what motivates me, as silly as it sounds.
MC: What was the most challenging part about being in the honours and directed studies programs? What is the most rewarding part of it?
A: I think searching for literary articles to justify my hypothesis is the hardest part of a research, but once you get through that it gets easier. There are two aspects that I find the most rewarding. First, completing the collection of my data. Secondly, coming to a conclusion after analysing my results. I like to know why or why not my results are significant in the world.
Ak: How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
A: Talking to profs. Maybe I’m just a teacher’s pet, and I have no life, but I love talking to profs. Ben, for example, is one of my favourite profs. I like watching his Twitch streams and interacting with him, and back when he had Bagels with Ben, I used to go all the time to get to know people in my class. For me, he was really really important, because he persuaded me to pursue research outside of UBC, and I really am grateful to Ben for that. He is one of my most important connections in university, and through him, I have made many more connections. I think part of it is also understanding how profs and lecturers found their interest in their field, and finding inspiration from them about where you might find your calling.
Ak: What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time? Perhaps something like a dream career…
A: I love to talk about this. Short term goals – I am applying to grad school. I’m applying to SFU because they have a great forensic psychology program. I’m hoping to study clinical forensic psychology there. In 5 years time, my goal is to be doing my PhD there. I want to study psychopathy and other personality disorders within a forensic population. A lot of people in the criminal justice system have mental illness, and many aren’t getting the treatment they need partially because the system isn’t designed for treatment. And because of this, they are likely to end up recidivating, which means they might commit a crime again and end up back in the system. I want to help them break that cycle. People are already doing this, but I contribute to that area of research and application. I want to study personality disorders, like psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder, and my dream career would be to help these offenders reintegrate into society.