Each March, the executive committee for Div. 5 holds a business meeting with representatives from our sections, committee chairs and officers. For the last four years, the meeting has included a mini-conference on the day before the business meeting. On March 22, 2019, Div. 5 held a mini-conference at Arizona State University to honor Professor Leona Aiken for her trailblazing contributions to teaching, mentorship and service. The title of the conference was “Blending Psychology and Methods: A Conference in Honor of Professor Leona Aiken.”
Many of Leona’s former students and colleagues presented at the conference, demonstrating a legacy of contributions in psychological statistics, health psychology, teaching and applied research. Presentations reported new research on women’s health, identification of subgroups differentially affected by interventions, analysis of interaction effects, mediating processes of health interventions, history of the journal Psychological Methods, replication methods and navigating career paths inside and outside of psychology departments. Aiken’s extensive leadership in support of psychological methods and health psychology was noted including her service as president of Div. 5, the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology and the Western Psychological Association.
Some of the consistent themes mentioned in the conference were Aiken’s emphasis on detailed explication of the links between theory and statistical methods, her outstanding and extensive mentorship, her unforgettable and inspirational teaching and her role as a force for scientific psychology. The agenda for the meetingopens in new window can be found online and the slides for the presentationsopens in new window can also be found online. The meeting was supported by the Society for Multivariate Experimental Research, The Robert B. Cialdini Leap Forward fund and Div. 5.
Topics discussed at the Div. 5 business meeting included the revision of bylaws for Div. 5, activities to increase membership and to improve the financial standing of the division and APA initiatives and strategies to make our division a more vibrant organization. The extensive activities planned for Div. 5 at the August APA convention were also discussed. That meeting will include presidential addresses by Amy Schmidt and David Mackinnon, a ceremony for division award winners, an outstanding and free workshop on the use of the programming language R for the application of modern psychometrics analysis by Bill Revelle and Oscar Gonzalez and important presentations on big data analysis, modern causal inference and many other topics central to methods in psychology. See you in Chicago.