This Week, In I-O: March 2014

Friday, March 21, 2014

This Week, In I-O to come back!

It has been a few hectic years of downtime but TWIIO is set to return shortly. The format will be changing slightly to a one-person show with guest speakers. If you would like to be a guest or suggest an article for review send us an email at thisweekinio@gmail.com.

Stay tuned for more posts.

About the Author

Scott Withrow

Hello, my name is Scott Withrow. I am from the small town of Sandpoint, Idaho. After high school I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Idaho. During my "gap year" I did some work as a web developer before I decided to further my education. Currently, I very nearly have my Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Bowling Green State University. I have accepted a position at Koç University as assistant professor of Psychology, where I will start August 2014.

My major research focus' are psychometrics and occupational health psychology. A primary focus of my research has been on the utilization of Item Response Theory (IRT) to evaluate how tests function. Although much of my research has been focused on using psychometrics to improve tests or uncover hidden response tendencies I have also focused on what is practically significant and useful in psychometrics. For example, although IRT provides great tools for improving measurement precision with fewer items it is frequently passed up in practice because of the complexity in use and the complexity of communicating how and why IRT is used. My second substantial area of research has been in Occupational Health Psychology (OHP). I have mainly done research on topics like incivility in the workplace and stress outcomes although I have also studied some tertiary topics like adiposity and safety climate. OHP is a burgeoning field of study as the health outcomes of work stress have made it essential for researchers to conceptualize ways to ameliorate the ill effects of work and overwork. My research in this area has been on novel ways to study incivility by exploring potential experimental designs, using vignettes, and situational judgment tests.

My dissertation is about combining my OHP research stream and my psychometrics research steam by exploring the measurement of incivility with the Generalized Graded Unfolding Model (GGUM), which is an IRT model that assumes that people answer items by finding the response option that is closest to themselves (Thurstonian ideal point measurement) as opposed to a more is better approach (Likert-type dominance measurement). In my dissertation I propose items that rely on GGUM’s ability to score double barreled items to ask questions like “my supervisor ignores my contributions, but it may not be their fault.” Here we are able to directly ask questions about a construct that is, by nature, very ambiguous.