objectification and feminism and periods………oh my!

Anytime one writes, one must be prepared to revise.  I’ve known this since I started writing papers in grade school, and it has only become more important now that I regularly publish.  I accept this and have actually come to welcome the opportunity to strengthen my writing after receiving feedback from expert readers.  Despite this, there is always some stress involved in this process.

My frequent research partner and I recently received a set of reviews for an article we’re really excited about.  While the reviews asked us to make substantial changes, they were generally favorable, and we have ever hope that this paper will be published in this journal after a round or two of revisions.  This one was made a bit more stressful, however, because we had to do a number of new/revised statistical analyses.

Anytime you need to re-analyze data, it is possible that your conclusions could change drastically.  We faced just such a situation yesterday afternoon as we delved back into our data.  In the end, however, we had very few changes, and none that were particularly troublesome.  We now feel that a quality revision is possible in relatively short order.  This also served to remind me how much fun it can be to get down and dirty with data.  My undergrad stat teacher, let alone my graduate mentors, would be so proud!

Perhaps I’m just a small person who craves external recognition to make up for something lacking in my childhood (please ignore this mom), but I always get an incredible kick out of seeing my name in print.

This paper appeared in the most recent issue of Sex Roles.  This is an example of my research on feminism.  In this paper, my colleagues and I question the utility of a conceptual model of feminist identity development for today’s young women as opposed to the women who came of age with the second wave of feminism upon whose experiences the model was based.  More to the point, we really quibble with the utility of the operationalizations of this model.

We’re in the review/revision process with a sister paper looking more specifically at operationalization issues, so hopefully I’ll have more for you about this soon.  For now, I’ll just keep being a small person who’s glad this paper is now in print and another paper was just accepted to Psychology of Women Quarterly (but I’ll save the details of that for another post).

Okay…this may seem a bit off topic, but stick with me for a minute…..

As a psychologist, particularly a social psychologist, I often see examples of the material I teach and study everywhere.  I even have my husband finding examples of this stuff now and will be blogging about this with my general psych students this summer.  Research is also everywhere, and I made an interesting link between an activity I love and my dorky love of all things research yesterday.

My husband and I went wine tasting.   We both enjoy good food and wine, and part of the fun of living in Virginia is that there are a lot of great local wines.  As we were leaving a vineyard where we tasted three viogniers, I commented that, while I didn’t love any of them, it was a lot of fun to see how different the grape could be.

This got me thinking about the few vertical tastings I’ve done at vineyards over the last few years.  I realized that it’s like an experiment.  You take the same grape(s) grown on the same vines in the same vineyard and vary rain, sun, soil conditions, etc. and get very different products.  Add in some differing barrel practices and occasional changes in winemakers and you get tons of fun.

What can I say…I am a dork, I love research, and you now have another reason for doing a vertical tasting if you ever get the chance.

I don’t mean to get all existential on you, but a bit of an introduction seems like a good place to start.

I am, among other things, an active researcher in the field of the psychology of women.  I love what I do, but research is a long and often frustrating process.  I thought this blog would be a good way to keep others up to date on my work and do some semi-public brainstorming while also serving as a reminder of the fact that I do love to do research.

So, what do I study….objectification, feminism, and periods of course.

Objectification is the major idea linking most of my work at the moment.  This is the idea that women’s bodies are often viewed as beautiful objects for the pleasure of the viewer.  While both men and women objectify others (with women as the primary targets of the objectifying gaze), I’m particularly interested in how women can internalize this (something known as self-objectification).

I also study the dreaded f-word: feminism.  (Get your mind out of the gutter!)  I am interested in people who do and do not self-label as feminists, the ideas people hold about feminists and feminism, and the relationship between feminist attitudes and identity to other constructs.

My third area of research (and really the area that should surprise no one who’s known me since my high school peer-ed days) is about menstruation.  I study attitudes about menstruation, education about menstruation, and media representations related to menstruation.  I guess I just find periods strangely fascinating.

Of course, the fun of being a researcher at a small school without grant pressure is that I can also follow wild hairs and pick up and drop research areas as the mood strikes.  Given that, you could check in and hear about almost anything.

My goal is to try to update this blog once or twice a week.  I’ll talk about ideas, process, weird experiences, etc.  Join the discussion and share my journey.