Current Research Projects

Resilience

• Academic Resilience in collaboration with Dr. Ada Woo and Profs. Ira Bernstein and Nelly Tournaki.

  I focus on the quantification of resilience, primarily vis-à-vis academic success. Therefore, my interest is on the presence and operationalization of resilience within a population that has already demonstrated some success and that is not necessarily from a severely disadvantaged background. To study resilience there, I typically ask for students to provide self reports on experiences (e.g., stressful events, deleterious situations) and beliefs (e.g., about themselves); I analyze the relationships between these with measures of academic success. Not surprisingly, the development and proofing of self-report instruments are key to my research here, and so far represent most of my work here. A paper I presented with Dr. Ada Woo at AERA in 2009 summarizes one of the gists of this line of research.

  
  
• Revision of the Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ) with Prof. Eileen Gigliotti

  Prof. Gigliotti is not new to research on the role of social support on the success of nurses’ transition into their career and success during it. I, however, am. Together, we are working to revise the NSSQ by:

  1. reducing its error variance through a more sophisticated and trouble-free respondent interface, and
  2. achieving finer discrimination between the various domains of support assessed by the NSSQ
  
  in order to improve:
  
  
  1. the efficiency of the measurements of the domains of support it contains, and
  2. researchers’ ability to utilize the often under-used wealth of information contained within the NSSQ.

 

Metabolic Syndrome

Conducted through a collaboration with the College and Staten Island’s Nursing Department and the Richmond University Medical Center, we are investigating the prevalence and behavioral/demographic predictors of metabolic syndrome among Staten Island residents. Our research builds and expands upon the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC HANES), which itself is a regional correlate of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). My primary role on the team is lead statistician.

 

Animal Welfare

• Animal-Assisted Interventions in collaboration with Profs. Lieve Meers and Frank O. Ödberg both of Ghent University’s Laboratory for Ethology, Prof. Simona Normando of the Dipartimento di Scienze Sperimentali Veterinarie at the Università di Padova, and others.

  This is an exciting series of both clinical and research projects primarily centering around establishing a strong theoretical foundation for Animal-Assisted Interventions so that this diverse and quickly-growing field can develop in an organized way. Most of the work is lead by Drs. Meers and Ödberg. They have done an excellent job of bridging the often-wide gaps between the field’s researchers and practitioners to ensure safety; planful program creation and implementation; and valid, informative inquiry. Not surprisingly then, subsumed under our efforts are also evaluations of programs both in terms of their efficacy and their ability to maintain the welfare of all involved—especially for the animals employed.



• Efficacy of humane education in collaboration with HEART and Phillip Mascendaro of the University of Missouri

  Although the primary goal of this series of evaluations is to assess the effect of an integrated humane education lesson module on upper elementary students’ attitudes about animal welfare issues, we are also investigating the effects on students’ psycho-social development.

 

Modern (IRT) and Traditional Psychometrics

In addition to my work using traditional psychometrics to validate and explore the domains relevant to some of the above areas of research (especially those related to the Academic Resilience Inventory and the NSSQ), I’m working with Prof. Ira Bernstein and Dr. Ada Woo to better estimate the ability (theta) of takers of computer adaptive tests near the lower cut-off scores. This would allow quicker and more accurate judgments to be made about whether a test taker does indeed pass a test or not.

Previous Research Projects Are Outlined in My Curriculum Vitæ

---

This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.