My research interests reflect three concerns: substantive, methodological, and statistical
Substantive research interests:
My primary research interest is in people's daily lives -- the ebb and flow of daily experience. This work has focused on various topics, including, but not limited to relationships between daily experience and psychological well-being, and examining personality and personality processes through the lens of daily experience. In the past few years, I have extended this work to include a cross and multicultural psychological perspective, with a specific focus on acculturation -- the adaptation of people to new cultural environments. These interests are reflected in a study I am conducting examining on the daily lives of Muslim immigrants to four European countries. Click below to go the study home page:
Study of daily experiences of immigrants to Western Europe. An organizing theme of this research is the self. How is daily experience shaped by the self and how is the self shaped by daily experience?
Methodological interests:
My primary interest is the study of naturally occurring social interaction, i.e., the social events that constitute people's day-to-day social lives. For over 30 years I have studied social interaction using variants of a diary technique known as the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR) that I developed with Ladd Wheeler in the 1970s (Wheeler & Nezlek, 1977). Participants in these studies describe the social events they have during a specified period of time, usually two weeks. These descriptions include quantitative measures (e.g., duration, number and identity of others who were present) and qualitative measures (e.g., ratings of enjoyment, felt intimacy, social support). Although the specific measures have varied from study to study, the methods used in different studies have been very similar. My research has focused on individual differences in interaction, within-person effects, and interactions of between- and within-person effects.
A complementary interest is the study of day-to-day variability in psychological states, with an emphasis on reactivity to daily events. Each day, participants in these studies provide descriptions of their psychological states and the events that occurred. Such descriptions can be collected every day or according to another schedule such as twice a week. Hypotheses of interest concern the nature and meaning of within-person variability per se, the covariation between psychological states and daily events, and how such covariation is moderated by trait level individual differences such as depression.
Statistical interestst:
The vast majority of my research relies upon multivariate measures and multilevel data structures, the analysis of which requires the use of structural equation and random coefficient modeling. Accordingly, I am interested in understanding and developing applications of such techniques to the wide variety of phenomena of interest to personality and social psychologists. As part of my interest in multilevel analysis, I also offer workshops on an occasional basis.
For more information click here:Workshop information