Writing Group

Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/02/27/16/

As the mother of four (2 sons born in grad school, 2 sons born on the tenure track), people are always asking me “how do you do it?”  [Note, my husband never gets asked this question, which is a whole other blog post on gender attitudes.] My go to answer is always “high quality husband, high quality childcare”.  This is true. But, I have also been interested in productivity for a while. I have read several books on the subject, including books designed for academics like Advice for New Faculty by Robert Boice and How to Write a Lot by Paul Silva, and those designed for a general audience like Leave the Office Earlier by Laura Stack. I also participated in the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development’s Faculty Success Program with Kerry Ann Roquemore, which I really enjoyed.

Recently a friend posted on Facebook that he and his wife, who are both on the tenure track, were going to need some tips for success with multiple children.  So, my friend Dave’s comment is inspiring my next series of posts.  I am going to post a few tips that I have found have helped me be productive.  Most I have implemented in the past five years or so, and I really think they have helped up my productivity.

The first tip I want to share is on my writing group.  After reading How to Write a Lot, my colleague Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan and I started a writing group with our graduate students. We started out simply; I remember that our first semester one of our tasks was to read How to Write a Lot.  We devised a schedule for the quarter (though Ohio State is now on semesters, so we now devise our schedule by semesters), and each person in the group took a week to share a piece of writing with the group. We usually distribute a draft of a paper, though sometimes it might just be an idea for a paper, or a conference proposal. Sarah and I both take turns in addition to the graduate students. The group helped boost our productivity by creating deadlines for the students, and for us.  For instance, if a student presented a paper at a conference in the fall, we would encourage the student to put the paper on our schedule to read in the spring.  This is very important because publishing is key for both tenure, and what I call the “first tenure track” – grad school.  The job market is so competitive, and to stand out at all, students need to make sure they are submitting their work for publication early and often. We found that writing group was successful and resulted in several submissions.

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How to publish your paper rejected by Demography in the Journal of Family Psychology

Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/02/22/how-to-publish-your-paper-rejected-by-demography-in-the-journal-of-family-psychology/

One of the best things about being in an interdisciplinary department is that you can publish where you want – there is not a group of “top journals” that you have to push your papers in.  My colleagues in Sociology are trying to get papers in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. My colleagues in developmental psychology are going for Developmental Psychology and Child Development. In my interdisciplinary department, the only guideline we have used is that the journal have an impact factor over 1 if possible (though this is not a hard and fast rule).

Therefore, I can send my papers where I think they best fit and get a readership. Family and intimate relationship research is particularly interdisciplinary, and as such, I have a lot of options. I have submitted papers to Demography, American Sociological Review, Journal of Family Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, etcetera. Of course, I do not have papers published in all of these journals, but I have tried them all at one point or another!  What is different for interdisciplinary researchers is that after a paper is rejected at one journal, such as Demography, you might want to resubmit it to another journal in a different field, such as the Journal of Family Psychology. That is the story of this paper.

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Welcome to Adventures in Human Development and Family Science!

Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/02/18/welcome/

I have been thinking about writing a blog for a while now.  But, with so many great blogs (Family Inequality, Pearls of Wisdom: The Blog, Professional Development, Sociological Images) I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. There are always things I would like to suggest – i.e. check out this great post on writing an introduction – but I can do that now that I am officially on twitter (Follow me: @ClaireKampDush).

In thinking about what I have to contribute, I finally think I *may* have found a hole in what is out there on the world wide web.  A blog dedicated to the trials and tribulations conducting interdisciplinary research – and specifically – interdisciplinary family and developmental research.  Many times when people ask what department I am in, they look confused. Actually, I am confused at this point.  For my first 6 years at Ohio State, I was in the Department of Human Development and Family Science (HDFS). We just recently went through a merger, and now I am in the Human Development and Family Science program in the Department of Human Sciences. Human Sciences is a broad (!) term we picked to describe our department that includes psychologists, demographers, sociologists, and economists in the HDFS program, economists, fashion designers, and hospitality managers in the Consumer Sciences Program, nutritionists from bench science to dietitians in the Nutrition program, and sports managers to exercise scientists in the Kinesiology program.  So, if anyone is prepared to blog from the trenches of interdisciplinary research, I think we members of the Department of Human Sciences are!

That said, I also believe I am uniquely qualified to blog about conducting interdisciplinary research. I worked with clinical psychologist Laurie Kramer and psychologist (though I never knew what his discipline was until I saw that he was in the APA on his CV) Joe Pleck at Illinois, clinical psychologist Cathy Cohan, developmental psychologist Karen Fingerman, and sociologist Paul Amato at Penn State, and economist Liz Peters at Cornell. Thus, individuals from several social science disciplines have contributed to my training. And, since being at Ohio State, my primary collaborators have been developmental psychologist Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, clinical psychologist Galena Rhoades, and sociologist Miles Taylor.

I am a member of the American Sociological Association,  Association for Psychological ScienceCouncil on Contemporary FamiliesInternational Association for Relationship ResearchNational Council on Family RelationsPopulation Association of America, and the Society for Research on Child Development. I review for journals in family studies, sociology, psychology, and demography.  All in all, I am inherently interdisciplinary, and I am passionately so. I always tell my graduate students that the most exciting research can grow from interdisciplinary thinking.  For instance, as a family demographer (note that demography is also an interdisciplinary field), psychologists often ask me if I am concerned that someone else is going to conduct my research idea in a secondary dataset.  For the most part, I have not found this to be a problem, as I find that I usually am asking different questions than those in the disciplines are because I am considering important factors from across them. It is not always easy to conduct interdisciplinary research, be in an interdisciplinary department, and have to constantly tell people what “HDFS” is and that no, I am not a therapist.  But, it can also feel really great!

WHEN SOMEONE SAYS HDFS SOUNDS INTERESTING

I hope you enjoy my blog, and I hope to have something to share with you once a week.

Claire