|
An
Interesting Career in Psychology:
Research
Career at HumRRO
Peter
Ramsberger, Human Resources Research Organization
 In
the essay I wrote to accompany my applications to graduate school,
I said I wanted to get a PhD in Social Psychology so I could teach
and do basic research in a university setting. I’m not sure
when my view of this began to change, but it may well have been
after I spent one of my office hours as a teaching assistant reviewing
a recent exam—item by item—with a student who was
unhappy with his grade. Several times I pointed out that the information
covered was in the book or had been addressed in class. The student
apparently felt no compunction about informing me that he had
not read the book and only attended a few class sessions. After
going through every question on the test, he turned to me and
explained, “Look. I’m pre-law, and I can’t afford
to get a D on a &$*%* Social Psychology test.” Well,
afford it or not, he got his D, and I think it was then that I
started to consider the idea of working in other settings.
I came to the Human Resources Research Organization
(HumRRO) during my third year of graduate school. Although I realized
that working full time might slow down the pace of my academic
progress (and it did), I felt the need to start applying what
I was learning and that simply wasn’t happening in my job
as a clerk in a Government Printing Office bookstore. HumRRO is
a nonprofit research and development firm headquartered in Alexandria,
VA. My first assignment involved reading articles on leadership
training and writing abstracts of them. This, in turn, allowed
the senior HumRRO staff member I was working for to write an assessment
of the state of the art in this field. It turned out to be a good
way to start one’s career, in that I don’t think I’ve
performed as mind numbing a task in the 22 years since.
It wasn’t long before I got my first major
assignment. I had been helping out a more senior colleague as
he conducted a Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the Federal
Voting Assistance Program by surveying Americans living around
the world. About a month into the project, he decided to take
a job elsewhere and I suddenly found myself with the title of
Project Director—heady stuff for such a junior member of
the staff. I was lucky that the rest of the effort went well,
and it was satisfying to find out that several improvements to
the program were initiated in response to the results of the study.
At that point, my career took quite a detour as
I became involved in a project aimed at evaluating an early interactive
video system as a tool for basic skills education. It was around
this time that the Department of Defense renormed its military
entrance test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery,
or ASVAB. Unfortunately, in the rush to get through this process,
a mistake was made. As a result, thousands of below-average aptitude
youth were inadvertently admitted into the military. It wasn’t
until commanders in the field began to report problems they were
having with these men that the mistake was found and corrected.
But the challenge of training those already admitted remained.
Interactive video seemed like a natural for this
purpose because of the lack of need for reading skills, the potential
power to involve trainees, and the ability to provide immediate
feedback and remediation. I suddenly found myself writing training
design documents and scripts for video productions, a far cry
from attribution theory and research on interpersonal attraction.
As it turned out, this type of activity would dominate my time
for the next several years. I was part of a team that developed
programs for physicians and nurses on treating trauma victims.
These were video-based simulations that were derived from actual
emergency room cases. The user had over 300 options available
at all times to diagnose, treat, and monitor the patient, whose
condition would change based on the specific combination of actions
taken. By the end of the project it was not uncommon to walk down
the halls and hear staff members discussing the advisability of
inserting chest tubes or intubating patients given the nature
of their injuries and current condition. And it was fun to see
segments of the programs when they were featured on an episode
of the television program St. Elsewhere.
And then it was on to the rails. This was another
interactive video effort aimed at helping train dispatchers understand
and correctly apply the railroad’s operating rules. I had
honestly never given train dispatching much thought until my involvement
in this project, but found it to be a fascinating business. We
rode freight trains around the Midwest to learn more about how
railroads work, and by the end of the project I could look over
dispatchers’ shoulders and figure out exactly what they
were doing and why.
Eventually I returned to the more familiar world
of research, but the variety continued. Several colleagues and
I performed a study in which we located lower aptitude soldiers
admitted during Project 100,000 and the previously mentioned ASVAB
misnorming. Project 100,000 was initiated during the Vietnam era,
at which time the aptitude standards were purposefully lowered
with the idea that giving disadvantaged youth—who were more
likely to score low on the military entrance test—training
and experience that would provide them a leg up when they returned
to the civilian world. (Although there were those who suspected
more utilitarian motives—namely getting the manpower needed
for the war without cutting draft deferral programs.) Once located,
these veterans participated in a survey in which they provided
information about their subsequent life experiences. We then compared
them to a group of lower-aptitude men of the same age who never
served in the military. Turns out, based on our evidence, being
a soldier didn’t help these veterans much at all. This was
not a popular finding among those who feel that the military should
be tasked with performing a job corps function.
Over the years I’ve been able to take part
in a wide array of other research and development efforts, including
an assessment of the impact of conducting military basic training
in a gender-integrated environment, validating the training provided
to U.S. Customs Canine Enforcement Officers, writing an interactive
video-based program on living with HIV, and developing orientation
training for the Department of Labor’s new occupational
information system, O*NET.
Contract research has its drawbacks, chief among
them being the need to keep your focus not just on what you are
doing at the moment, but what is available to do down the road.
But this is offset by the fact that you generally get to do a
lot of interesting work, learn new skills, and experience a big
piece of the way psychology is applied in the “real world.” •
(Originally
published in the March/April 2002
issue of Psychological
Science Agenda,
the newsletter of the APA Science Directorate.)
More Interesting
Careers in Psychology....
|
