Tag Archives: research

Engaging in a Research Project with an International Team – Opportunities and Problems

ID-100160549Doing science is great, but doing it together with people you can learn from and who share your research interests – that’s fantastic! Add the cross-cultural dimension to the project and it grows even better! Why doesn’t everyone do that? Regrettably the projects involving collaborative work with other young scientists and/or students who love research can often be hard to begin and even tougher to maintain. Although undeniably rewarding, working in a traditional team already has a number of difficulties, while doing it with people who you can’t communicate with face-to-face adds a whole new pile of concerns. Let’s face it – even with a great concept writing a paper doesn’t always go smoothly and it can turn into tough, uninspiring work; keeping up with an international team and all the things that come with being part of one (things we often don’t even have to think of when working alone, such as communication problems, file storage, different ethics procedures than these in our academic institution, other people’s needs, skills and motivation, etc.) can quickly turn our initial enthusiasm into disillusionment.  Well, thanks to the advances in technology and some good old tips and ideas – it doesn’t have to be so bleak and discouraging! Read on for some useful strategies, ideas and tools to help start off your collaboration efforts, keep your team together, your productivity high and your experiences positive while conducting cross-cultural research with peers from abroad!  Continue reading

Etien Benov

Etien Benov

Etien Benov is currently a BSc Psychology student in Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" and he is serving as a Bulletin Editor in the Journal of European Psychology Students. His interests are mainly in neuroscience research and philosophy of science.

More Posts

Facebooktwitterrss

Twitter in The University: How Using Twitter Can Benefit Students and Early Career Researchers

Twitter is stereotypically portrayed as a website for following celebrities and posting mundane tidbits. Recently, I realized that Twitter could be used as an academic tool – to share and receive ideas and information in an educational context. Indeed, students and early career researchers should be capitalizing on Twitter to learn new information, connect with others, and share interesting thoughts. Continue reading

Julie Lee

Julie Lee (@synapticlee) is a second year psychology undergraduate at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Her research interests are in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.

More Posts

Facebooktwitterrss

Are the Methods of Psychology to Blame for its Unscientific Image? The Basis of Public Perceptions of ‘Scientific’ Research

Crystal-ball2Psychology is defined to students as the scientific study of human behaviour. However, when the American Psychological Association surveyed 1,000 adult members of the public, 70% did not agree with the statement, ‘psychology attempts to understand the way people behave through scientific research’ (Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, 2008, p. 29). Lay people deny, what is to those within psychology, an undeniable fact: that psychology aims to test theory-grounded hypotheses in an objective, replicable and empirical manner – and is therefore scientific. Recently, psychologists have investigated the reasons for such a divide between expert and novice views of the field. In doing so, they have uncovered how lay people evaluate whether a subject deserves the scientific stamp of approval. Continue reading

Robert Blakey

Robert Blakey

Robert Blakey is a third year undergraduate student of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and was a member of the 2012-2013 cohort of EFPSA's Junior Researcher Programme. He is currently carrying out a research project on the effect of interaction on estimation accuracy and writing a dissertation on consumer neuroscience. He is also interested in social cognition and specifically, public perceptions of influences on behaviour.

More Posts

Facebooktwitterrss

The Impostor Syndrome

’

It has become increasingly clear that academia is rife with a condition known as the ‘impostor phenomenon’. The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Clance and Imes in describing a sample of high-achieving women who were not able to internalise their many successes. Like many others today, these women felt that they had gotten to their place in life only by a series of flukes. The so-called syndrome can be debilitating; those with it feel like frauds and, worst of all, that at any moment they could be found out and exposed (Gravois, 2007). Recently, more and more people in academia have ‘admitted’ to having the impostor syndrome.

 

Continue reading

Julie Lee

Julie Lee (@synapticlee) is a second year psychology undergraduate at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Her research interests are in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.

More Posts

Facebooktwitterrss

Confessions of a Research Blog Editor

I can’t keep secrets. I’m not referring to my friend’s hush-hushes or any information that may harm others in any shape or form. I am talking about lessons and experiences in life that are worth sharing with others. For example, when I made a mistake of choosing an overly complex research question for my dissertation, I decided to write an article to tell everyone about it, so that others won’t make the same mistake as I did. This habit of mine, I suspect, comes from having been immersing myself in the world of scientific research for almost a decade. You see, the very basis of a researcher’s job is to develop new knowledge that contributes towards human’s understanding of the world, and to share these new information with everyone.

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterrss