Div. 5 held a mini-conference in my honor at the March 2019 business meeting, entitled “Blending Psychology and Methods: A Conference in Honor of Professor Leona Aiken.” David MacKinnon, Div. 5 president, created and implemented this conference. I am humbled by and grateful for the event, the capstone experience of my career. To be sure, the event is a gift with immeasurable meaning to me. It was an intergenerational experience that brought together my former PhD students, now successful academics, who described their current research programs. To a one, these programs seamlessly blend the substance and methods of psychology.
Div. 5 has been my professional home in APA in 1985, when Lee Sechrest recommended that I become active in the division. How fortunate I was to follow Lee’s recommendation. I count with pleasure the remarkable cadre of methodologists with whom I have worked in Div. 5. Div. 5 introduced me to the broader field of methodology, for example, the testing industry, which was far from my own professional experience. Over the years, Div. 5 has provided a platform from which to press forward a collaborative agenda of the centrality of methodology in psychological science. For me, the peak experience was participating in the successful drive to establish Psychological Methods as an APA journal, in collaboration with Div. 5 presidents Roger Kirk, Carol Dwyer, Mary Tenopyr, among others. Div. 5 opened the larger world of APA to me through my many years as Div. 5 Council representative; this post yielded multiple opportunities to press forward the Div. 5 methodology agenda.
Thank you, Div. 5, for all the opportunities you provided and for all the ways in which you broadened my career. Thank you, David Mackinnon and Div. 5, for the conference in my honor.
Leona Aiken
Professor Emerita,
Arizona State University,
Department of Psychology
Past president, Div. 5