Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award
David Kaplan, PhD, is the Patricia Busk professor of quantitative methods in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Kaplan holds affiliate appointments in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Population Health Sciences and the Center for Demography and Ecology, and is also an honorary research fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Kaplan’s program of research focuses on the development of Bayesian statistical methods for education research. His work on these topics is directed toward applications to large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal survey designs. He is actively involved in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). He served on the Technical Advisory Group from 2005-2009 and the Questionnaire Expert Group from 2004-present. He served as chair of the latter group for PISA 2015 and remains a member of the Questionnaire Expert Group for PISA 2018 and PISA 2021.
Kaplan also sits on the Design and Analysis Committee and the Questionnaire Standing Committee for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Kaplan is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award, a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Div. 5), a fellow of the German Institute for International Educational Research, and was a Jeanne Griffith Fellow at the National Center for Education Statistics. Kaplan received his PhD in education from UCLA in 1987.
Distinguished Contributions to Qualitative Inquiry Award
Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, is professor of clinical psychology at The Fielding Graduate University. She was formerly a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a visiting professor at Harvard University School of Education and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. She is a co-founder of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology and editor of the APA journal, Qualitative Psychology. With Amia Lieblich, she co-edited eleven volumes of The Narrative Study of Lives, a series dedicated to publishing qualitative research. She received both the Henry A. Murray Award and the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from APA as well as a Fulbright Fellowship. Based on interviews she has conducted over 35 years, she has written three books exploring women’s identity longitudinally (Finding Herself, Revising Herself), and, most recently, Paths to Fulfillment: Women’s Search for Meaning and Identity. Many of her other books (The Space Between Us, Best Friends, Playing Pygmalion) are based on interviews, and she has authored many journal articles and book chapters that explore the theory and practice of qualitative inquiry. Recently, she has authored Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry: A Relational Approach. She has conducted workshops on qualitative inquiry in France, Norway, Finland, Israel and England as well as in the US. She was a member of the APA task force that produced the “Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Research.”
Jacob Cohen Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring Award
Daniel Bauer, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). The primary goals of Bauer’s program of research are to propose, evaluate and apply advanced quantitative modeling techniques to improve research on the development of negative health behaviors and psychopathology. He has taught a wide variety of classes and received a distinguished teaching award from UNC for post-baccalaureate instruction in 2016. In his teaching, Bauer draws upon his original training in developmental psychology to bridge between statistical theory and substantive application. He teaches students how to appropriately apply and interpret advanced quantitative methods in their own work while at the same time conveying a deep appreciation for the underlying logic and mathematical basis of statistical methods.
For the past decade, Bauer has also collaborated with Patrick Curran to develop a series of summer workshops on a variety of quantitative methods. Recently, Bauer and Curran further increased their outreach efforts by producing a series of free YouTube videos on quantitative methods that have received more than 10,000 views. Bauer’s children have helpfully pointed out that none of these videos is likely to go viral any time soon.
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring in Qualitative Inquiry Award
Larry Davidson, PhD, is a professor of psychology and director of the Program for Recovery and Community Health in the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine at Yale University. He also serves as senior policy advisor for the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and for five years was project director for the Recovery to Practice initiative of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Trained in phenomenological philosophy and its application to the development of human sciences, his research has been primarily qualitative and participatory in nature, conducted in collaboration with persons who have lived with experiences of mental illness and substance use. This research has focused on processes of recovery in serious mental illnesses and addictions and translating the implications of what has been learned about recovery into the development and evaluation of recovery-oriented policies and practices. These include person-centered care planning, peer-delivered recovery supports, and pathways to community inclusion for persons in recovery.
In addition to being a user of psychiatric care himself, Davidson has produced over 400 publications in collaboration with student, trainee and junior faculty mentees, including A Practical Guide to Recovery-Oriented Practice: Tools for Transforming Mental Health Care and The Roots of the Recovery Movement in Psychiatry: Lessons Learned. His work has been influential internationally in shaping the recovery agenda and in operationalizing its implications for transforming behavioral health systems to the provision of recovery-oriented, person-centered and culturally-responsive care.
Anne Anastasi Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award
Sonya Sterba, PhD, is an associate professor within the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University where she is also the director of the Quantitative Methods Program. In 2010 she earned her PhD in Quantitative Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of Daniel Bauer, PhD. She is the recipient of the 2018 Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences; the 2015 Cattell Early Career Award from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology; and a 2015 Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. Her work spans multilevel modeling, mixture modeling, and structural equation modeling frameworks, and it is often of particular relevance to developmental psychopathology research. One line of her work seeks to improve the application of mixture models via advances that address missing data handling, assessment and interpretation, and relationships with multilevel models. In other work, she studies how to accommodate complex nesting structures (e.g., partial nesting) using multiple modeling frameworks. She also studies problems associated with the practice of parceling in latent variable models. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Psychological Methods and Multivariate Behavioral Research.
Distinguished Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry Awards
Jessica Nina Lester, PhD, is an associate professor of Inquiry Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington. At Indiana University, she teaches graduate-level courses focused on qualitative research methodologies and methods. Lester has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous books, edited volumes and book chapters focused on discourse and conversation analysis, critical disability studies, and more general concerns related to qualitative research. Having been trained in cultural studies in education and research methodology, specifically qualitative research methodologies and methods, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to much of her work. Specifically, Lester’s research comprises three intersecting strands. The first strand of her research program focuses on the study and development of qualitative research methodologies and methods at a theoretical, conceptual and technical level. The second strand of her research program is focused on the study of everyday and institutional social interactions in both education and mental health contexts. The third strand of her research program is focused on critically examining the educational practices that serve to increase (or decrease) the participation and learning of students.
She currently serves as the associate director of the Conversation Analysis Research in Autism Group at the University of Leicester, UK, and the chair of the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Qualitative Research Special Interest Group. She is the recipient of AERA’s 2014 Division D Early Career Award in Measurement and Research Methodology, as well as multiple teaching awards.
Sara McClelland, PhD, is an assistant professor in the departments of Women’s Studies and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on critical feminist research methods that highlight how people develop and maintain a sense of deservingness and how intimate lives are impacted by discriminatory public policies. McClelland’s recent work has examined sex education, reproductive rights for minors, and the sexual health concerns of women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She has published in a wide variety of journals such as Qualitative Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and Journal of Sex Research. She was awarded the 2014 Michele Alexander Early Career Award from The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and the 2016 Mary Walsh Roth Teaching the Psychology of Women Award from APA’s Div. 35. She received her PhD in Social/Personality Psychology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2009 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows from 2009-2012.
Anne Anastasi Dissertation Award
Dan McNeish, PhD, is currently an assistant professor of Quantitative Psychology at Arizona State University. McNeish’s research focuses on issues in mixed effect and structural equation models with challenging data structures, small samples in particular. His dissertation, “Modeling Clustered Data with Few Clusters: A Cross-Discipline Comparison of Small Sample Methods” investigated frequentist and Bayesian methods for effectively modeling clustered data when the sample size was much smaller than the traditionally recommended 30 units. The article based on this work was subsequently published in Multivariate Behavioral Research and is the most viewed article of the 2016 volume year based on the journal’s reported metrics at the time of this writing.
He completed his MA and PhD in Measurement and Statistics at the University of Maryland under the guidance of Greg Hancock, Jeff Harring and Laura Stapleton. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University where he was mentored by Steve Stemler. Prior to Arizona State, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a Research Scientist at the Center for Developmental Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Distinguished Dissertations in Qualitative Inquiry Award
Heidi Mattila, PhD, received her masters and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from Fielding Graduate University. Mattila has taught graduate level courses within psychology as well as contemplative practices across multiple settings. Stay-at-home fathers, male primary caregivers of their children, represent an emergent form of fatherhood challenging gendered stereotypes related to breadwinning, caretaking and parenting. Mattila’s interdisciplinary dissertation, “The Social Construction of Stay-at-Home Fathering Across Social Spaces and Places,” is an innovative exploration into how implicit gendered stereotypes and social spaces interact outside conscious awareness impacting the men’s identities as male caregivers. Her study is an interdisciplinary project focusing on social dynamics across everyday spaces that interfaces between social psychology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Through research, teaching and clinical practice, Mattila wishes to enhance the awareness of the interaction of culture and gendered behaviors, especially the power of implicit gender stereotypes.
Mattila is currently engaged in private clinical practice with an emphasis on the intersection of culture and sexually exploitative behaviors. Mattila has published and presented within different intellectual disciplines.
Her first career was within finance in Europe and economic development in the U.S. While at the World Bank headquartered in Washington, D.C., she worked globally and held expert and executive-level positions with managerial responsibilities.