I would like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to Dr. Alan Ritter and Ms. Jennifer Ellen Nozick for their generous funding of the Jennifer Ritter Arts Internship Award. This summer, I had the privilege of conducting research in the Lydon Lab under the supervision of Dr. John E. Lydon. Alongside other projects, I worked on 鈥淪elf-Respect as a Moderator of Partner Transgression Effects on Commitment Levels.鈥� This project examined how individuals鈥� level of self-respect influences the relationship between the subjective betrayal and negativity of a partner transgression and relationship commitment. I worked with a graduate student to identify these variables of interest and used data from a larger study examining the way that individuals in romantic relationships make relationship judgments following a partner transgression and factors that influence this process. As part of this project, I assisted with administering the questionnaire, compensating participants, coding participant data, and interpreting the data for my subproject. Additionally, I had the opportunity to work on other projects in the lab which involved assisting with the writing of REB applications, creating questionnaires on Qualtrics, and working with previously collected lab data.
I was interested in an Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Award (ARIA) project because of my experience completing my Honours thesis in the Lydon Lab during the academic year. I had a wonderful experience working with the graduate students in the lab and developing my research skills. I decided to apply for the ARIA to learn more about the research process and expand my abilities. I was excited about the prospect of getting to focus on research without needing to attend to other responsibilities like course work. My learning objectives for this summer were to gain experience in all stages of the research process, increase my data analysis skills, and learn a new research software. I鈥檓 very grateful that I had the opportunity to do all this and more during my time in the lab.
One of the highlights of my ARIA experience included learning about and getting involved in the research being done by each graduate student in the lab. Additional highlights included learning to use the photo morphing software FantaMorph, honing my SPSS abilities while working with data from a study previously run in the lab, and coding partner transgression responses on scales of betrayal and negativity from nearly 500 participants. By far the biggest highlight was getting to work with such wonderful people. I learned so much from everyone in the lab about post-graduate education and their research experiences. A challenge I faced arose from working with data from a previous study. A lot of the data was in file formats no longer supported by the software we use to analyse data. Thus, I had to troubleshoot and was eventually able to convert about 45 data files from one format to another using R, organize them for future analysis, and calculate relevant variables with the data from these files on SPSS.
The ARIA internship has been a transformative experience, through which I鈥檝e further developed foundational research skills that I am sure will continue to serve me as I pursue further research opportunities. This experience has solidified my interest in psychological research by exposing me to more of the interesting work being done currently. The mentorship I received from my supervisor and the graduate students in the lab has been invaluable in helping me plan the rest of my degree and work towards a future in the field of Psychology.
I would like to finish by thanking Dr. Alan Ritter and Jennifer Ellen Nozick for this incredible opportunity. Thanks to their support I have been able to spend my summer in an amazing lab, doing exciting and fulfilling work.
