Within & Between

Trajectory of heritability to the heritability of trajectories? Measuring growth in skills and abilities over time is practically (maybe literally!) synonymous with developmental science. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about how static measurements of a skill can have different variance, and different predictors, from growth in that skill. After a general discussion, we dive into how that pla...

In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about what it’s like to serve on an academic search committee. To those of you who are about to serve on a committee (maybe for the first time), we will take you through the whole process from writing the call to making the offer. Or those of you on the market this year, peek behind the curtain. Every search is different! Things happen very differently from univ...

In this episode, Jess asks Sara to talk about LDBase, the data repository she has been building designed specifically to hold developmental science data. We discuss what LDbase is, what motivated her and her colleagues to start building it, what makes it unique, and how it works. Sara even describes several excellent resources you can find on the website that make data sharing easier. Go see it fo...

You may have noticed that the cycle of academic publishing is pretty broken. Scientists give their research papers to academic journals for free, then the journal puts that work behind a paywall. Sometimes institutions will pay for a package of subscriptions to these journals, often costing millions of dollars. Jess and Sara talk about this cycle, and how institutions, journals, and individuals ha...

In this episode Jess and Sara talk about the role of methodologist in developmental science, and how it’s different from a statistician. A methodologist is a content expert and a collaborator like any other, and we do our best work when we’re involved right from the initial planning stages of a project. Why? Because nearly every decision made in a research project can have implications for statist...

Well the spring 2021 semester is over, and - what is this feeling? We’re a little (a lot) overwhelmed. Jess and Sara describe their experiences, and theorize a bit about why it might be particularly bad right now. Is the pandemic over here in the US? What does that mean for our jobs? That feeling of one day more can sometimes be too much. We end by suggesting, maybe, we all need a break, and to gi...

The saga continues. In this episode we talk about the data management steps you’ll need to consider after you’ve collected your data. We talk a lot about data entry, including the science of how to do it well. We also discuss data merging, data cleaning, and the concept of “release” datasets. Finally, because it seems no episode is complete without Sara discovering something to be shocked about re...

You might think “data management” is just getting data ready to share, but it’s so much more. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about the expanded universe of data management. This is the first of a two part series, and focuses on some of the things you can do to help ensure you have good quality data before you even talk to a single participant. We talk about lots of fun data management tips an...

Turnabout is fair play in this episode as now Sara describes her new paper! Some developmental science research is focused on how the home environment is correlated (or co-occurs with) children’s skills, behaviors, or abilities. Sara explains that these correlations are also influenced by the shared genes between parents and their children, and that the genetic correlation may be inflating the tru...

New Paper Alert! Jess and her colleagues have a paper in review about a particular statistical method that we see a lot in developmental science. Have you ever run a confirmatory factor analysis and then saved (or extracted) the factor scores, turning them into observed scores for use in another analysis? If you have more than one latent factor, the default method for extracting factor scores can...

To celebrate hitting our 10,000 listens benchmark, Jess and Sara spend episode 10 discussing two listener questions. First, we talk about the decision to change or not to change your last name when you get married. It’s something many developmental scientists struggle with, and we talk about how (even though it feels unique) it’s not terribly different from other professions. Second, we discuss th...

Are you open-science curious? Ready to turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes happening in our field? Preprints are one of the most accessible steps in learning about, and might we even suggest embracing open science. To post a preprint, you put a digital copy of a completed paper online, somewhere others can read it.  In this episode, we discuss the advantages of preprints, different ways t...

Jess and Sara are both advocates for interdisciplinary science, and interdisciplinary science means collaborations! On this episode, we talk about why we love interdisciplinary science and why some departments would prefer a more focused line of research. We also talk about the life cycle of collaborations, how we start them, maintain them, and let them go. Links from this episode: The Hidden Curr...

New year, new goals! Goal setting helps keep you on task, helps you work towards bigger goals, and can help you feel more successful. But many of us really struggle with it (cough cough Jess cough cough). Sara walks us through the goal setting system she uses, how it differs by career stage. We talk about specifics including what to include in your long term goals (hint, only the things you can co...

For the end of 2020, we asked our listeners to name a few of their favorite things - favorite things about being a developmental scientist, that is. Our unscientific analysis of themes includes: Developmental scientists can translate our work into other fields, it’s very applicable to our parent friends, that the methods we use are creative and complex, and that working with kids is a blast (they...

What does it mean to have a lab, and who is part of it? In this episode, Jess and Sara describe their experiences with different lab setups and structures, and how they manage their meetings with students, projects, and collaborators. We discover that Sara has been using a lab management and productivity tool secretly for years! Our systems for working with our labs, projects, and students are alw...

As the semester draws to a close, Jess wakes up in the middle of the night concerned not with completing her grading, but with measuring inter-rater reliability for coding schemes. Reliability can refer to the agreement among raters, or agreement among items. There’s a lot of online discourse right now around reliability, but most of it is focused around the former: agreement among items. Over her...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic in 2020 must be in want of an online presence. Jess and Sara describe why you need to be online, and their experiences with social media, professional networks, and creating websites (and that twitch isn’t just what happens to Jess’s eye after 6 straight hours on zoom calls). The episode ends with our top three suggestions for how to get invo...

To be or not to be (a parent!) that is the question. One of our listeners reached out with a question about timing of starting a family during an academic career. Jess and Sara both describe their respective experiences with having children, how quickly they got back to work, and the pros and cons of the academic work-life balance. Resources: In case you don’t know what yeet means either. Thanks t...

In which we welcome you back to a new season of the podcast. Jess and Sara catch up on pandemic work and life. We describe the subtle and sometimes not so subtle feeling of being underwater that seems to accompany this particular time, describe how our online teaching is going, and discuss the different ways we’re translating and incorporating anti-racism into our courses. Resources: Many analyst...

Did you miss us? Just a small teaser of Season 2! First full episode is out November 18!!

Jess and Sara get a bit meta this week (some things never change), and discuss why academia is even a job. We walk through a fun and nerdy thought experiment: Is the Curriculum Vita a list of manifest variable indicators of some sort of latent variable of academia?  We discuss when and how we decide to leave a project lost in the woods. And think, for the first time in forever, about a project tha...

There’s a close link between the concepts of Perfection and Impostor Syndrome, perhaps mediated (or moderated?) by experiences of rejection. In this episode, we discuss that link, and personify it as Sara helps Jess try to cope with rejection and encourages her to get some rejected manuscripts back under review*. Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between , or email us letters about devel...

In this episode we talk about rejections - paper rejections. Jess and Sara describe their emotional and not so emotional reactions to finding out whether a paper has been rejected, offered a revise and resubmit, or accepted. We also discuss how much we change a rejected manuscript before we send it elsewhere, how to craft a revision letter, and the urban legend of  papers accepted on the firs...

In this episode, we revisit how we’re working during COVID. Topics include excellent desk space (Sara) or lack thereof (Jess), and how we are and are not balancing parenting and working at the same time. We also talk about preparing to teach at a distance, and whether we’re even allowed back on campus. Resources: Vijay Sathy - On who benefits from a flipped classroom and how to make your teaching...