Current Research Projects

Resilience

• Academic Resilience in collaboration with Dr. Ada Woo and Profs. Ira Bernstein and Nelly Tournaki.

  I focus on the quantification of resilience, primarily vis-à-vis academic success. Therefore, my interest is on the presence and operationalization of resilience within a population that has already demonstrated some success and that is not necessarily from a severely disadvantaged background. To study resilience there, I typically ask for students to provide self reports on experiences (e.g., stressful events, deleterious situations) and beliefs (e.g., about themselves); I analyze the relationships between these with measures of academic success. Not surprisingly, the development and proofing of self-report instruments are key to my research here, and so far represent most of my work here. A paper I presented with Dr. Ada Woo at AERA in 2009 summarizes one of the gists of this line of research.

  
  
• Revision of the Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ) with Prof. Eileen Gigliotti

  Prof. Gigliotti is not new to research on the role of social support on the success of nurses’ transition into their career and success during it. I, however, am. Together, we are working to revise the NSSQ by:

  1. reducing its error variance through a more sophisticated and trouble-free respondent interface, and
  2. achieving finer discrimination between the various domains of support assessed by the NSSQ
  
  in order to improve:
  
  
  1. the efficiency of the measurements of the domains of support it contains, and
  2. researchers’ ability to utilize the often under-used wealth of information contained within the NSSQ.

 

Social Justice, Moral, and Prosocial Development

The investigations here are primarily among adolescents, and therefore focus on the development of morals, etc. in social terms. It is also mostly concerned with understanding the importance of the development of self-efficacy both in the navigation of choice between involvement versus non-involvement in perceived inequalities. To date, I have conducted this research entirely in the field, usually with after-school and community-based organizations such as Boys & Girls Clubs and YWCAs/YMCAs.

The work I have done concerning children (roughly those who have not yet graduated to the middle grades) involves the role and influence of relationships with animals (and nature-oriented activities) in the development of empathy and prosocial behavior. It is therefore subsumed under my work related to animal welfare.

 

Animal Welfare

• Animal-Assisted Interventions in collaboration with Profs. Lieve Meers and Frank O. Ödberg both of Ghent University’s Laboratory for Ethology, Prof. Simona Normando of the Dipartimento di Scienze Sperimentali Veterinarie at the Università di Padova, and others.

  This are an exciting series of both clinical and research projects primarily centering around establishing a strong theoretical foundation for Animal-Assisted Interventions so that this diverse and quickly-growing field can develop in an organized way. Most of the work is lead by Drs. Meers and Ödberg. They have done an excellent job of bridging the often-wide gaps between the field’s researchers and practitioners to ensure safety; planful program creation and implementation; and valid, informative inquiry. Not surprisingly then, subsumed under our efforts are also evaluations of programs both in terms of their efficacy and their ability to maintain the welfare of all involved—especially for the animals employed.



• Dog Bite Prevention in collaboration with many animal welfare and humane education organizations across North America.

  Largely completed, our energy now is mainly devoted to publishing and disseminating the results. Simply enough, we created a dog bite prevention program meant to represent the type of program conducted with lower elementary students and assess the effectiveness of that program. The program was found to increase students’ knowledge about bite prevention.

 

Modern (IRT) and Traditional Psychometrics

In addition to my work using traditional psychometrics to validate and explore the domains relevant to some of the above areas of research (especially those related to the Academic Resilience Inventory and the NSSQ), I’m working with Prof. Ira Bernstein and Dr. Ada Woo to better estimate the ability (theta) of takers of computer adaptive tests near the lower cut-off scores. This would allow quicker and more accurate judgments to be made about whether a test taker does indeed pass a test or not.

Previous Research Projects Are Outlined in My Curriculum Vitæ

---

This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.