August 23, 2006

 

Projects on which I invite interested grad student participation.

 

I am working on a number of projects that I happily invite interested graduate students to speak with me about (836-3597 or plutgen@unm.edu ). Grad student participation could include: data analysis, online survey construction, theoretical/conceptual “think-tank” stuff, co-authoring conference papers or publications, and so forth.

 

Projects:

 

  1. How do bullied workers and witnesses to workplace bullying intersubjectively make sense of the experience? I have TONS of qualitative data that I’ve started coding but more work is needed on coding and writing up the results. I’ve presented this as a preliminary paper at Western, have written the draft literature review, and am currently reanalyzing the data.
  2.  I have four quantitative studies that indicate the following about workplace bullying: targeted women are more likely than targeted men to report women as the bully. What does this pattern mean? Why might we see this pattern across four different studies? I’ve begun a short “think” piece on this and would welcome someone who is a feminist scholar to help me explore the potential reasons. Although the project is built on quantitative findings, I see the piece as more of a theoretical/critical exploration of the pattern.
  3. There is an enormous body of research on negative social interactions at work. To date, no one has created a succinct discussion of the different constructs, how they are related, and how they differ. How might we summarize this body of work and present it to the communication field in a way that would generate interest from communication scholars? I have most of this literature in articles/books. An interested student would need to read the literature; together we could create a meaningful way to integrate it into an article with a “call” to communication researchers.
  4. Positive emotions may hold some of the solutions to workplace bullying, aggression, and harassment. I am working on a summary of the psychological and medical findings regarding the positive outcomes linked to positive emotions. I’m in the process of writing a literature-based piece that extrapolates these findings and transfers them to organizational settings. An interested student would need to read the positive emotion literature (I have most of this), and then we can brainstorm how these findings might be transferred into systems of organizational communication.
  5. I’ve started a piece arguing that workplace bullying is a communication topic, despite its predominant study in business/management and psychology. This is a chapter from my dissertation that could use another mind to sharpen the argument.
  6. I would like to develop an IRB application and experimental design testing the impact of positive emotion on organizational skills. I have a variety of models from psychology/medicine that could be adapted. Someone interested in experimental design might find this interesting.
  7. I am currently seeking persons who have lived with or are living with someone being bullied at work. This in-depth interview study focuses on the impact of one family member’s workplace abuse on other members of the family, family relationships, and family communication. To date, I have completed four interviews. I would like to locate and interview at least 6 other persons. Someone interested in the cross-over between organizational and interpersonal communication, or family communication, might want to work with me on this project. The project would involve assisting with locating participants, interviewing participants, data coding, data analysis and writing up findings.  (this project already has IRB approval)
  8. I have applied for IRB approval for an online survey entitled, The American Workplace Survey II.  It is a follow-up on an earlier project I did at ASU. The research questions in this study are (a) How frequently do workers experience positive and negative acts at work? (b) How frequently do specific positive/negative acts occur in the workplace? (c) What is the relationship between positive/negative communication and life quality measures? (d) What is the prevalence of witnessing and experiencing adult bullying at work? And (e) What do workers consider their best and worst experiences at work?

Once IRB approval is granted, the following are areas with a grad student might participate:  construction of the online survey (I have the survey questions firmed up for the most part), posting the survey online with Survey Monkey, contacting StudyResponse folks, converting online data (usually Excel) to SPSS, analyzing data findings, and writing up the results.