The Good Life Research Network
Connecting people who want to make the early career phase easier to navigate
Purpose
The early career phase (roughly the first 10 years post-graduation) is an exciting (and sometimes stressful) time for most people in psychology and other disciplines engaging with psychology in interdisciplinary work on the study of virtues. The purpose of this network of scholars is to make it easier for early career scholars to study the good life and ways of helping people grapple with limits of being human. This is an initiative developed through a partnership between Donnie Davis, MSTAR, and Daryl Van Tongeren, Director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College.
Why is it Challenging?
One of the key challenges in the early career phase is forming high trust relationships. Sometimes people are unsure how to develop teams that attempt difficult projects, such as multi-study empirical projects that have a chance of publication in top outlets or multi-site grant projects that require intricate coordination and execution, often in short periods of time. These kinds of relationships, and the underlying trust, may form over months or even years. In Putnam’s language, people need skills to develop bonding and bridging capital. Some relationships involve deepening trust and shared meaning and purpose. Others involve forming coallitions, which may require skills to carefully balance exploration of shared goals and values, while also leaving room for differences. For our network to make the early career phase easier to navigate, people may need a range of opportunities to practice what we might call cultural grounding and spanning. This also aligns with some of Steve Sandage’s ideas on the formation of clinicians through seasons of existential dwelling and seeking.
Join Our Planning Team
Donnie and Daryl have formed a planning team that includes other scholars committed to early career investment, such as Joshua Hook (University of North Texas), Jesse Owen (University of Denver), Elise Choe and Steven Sandage (Danielsen Institute, University of Boston), Preston Hill and Joshua Rice (Richmont Graduate University), and Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University). We looking for people who share a similar passion for supporting early career professionals within psychology and other disciplines that engage social science.
Here are some things we know we need:
Scholars who are willing to provide professional mentoring
People with skills for building in-kind support from local institutions or non-profit organizations
People willing to offer methodology workshops
People willing to help us plan to find partners in other cities so that more scholars can attend in-person programming
People willing to give feedback on projects (e.g., grants, multi-study papers) in their formative phase of development
People willing to facilitate connections with other divisions or groups focused on early career support (no reason to re-create the wheel, and if others are doing something well, we might as well join them rather than duplicate efforts)
Our priorities:
We want to promote professional friendships that enhance the quality of work though access to feedback and also enhance the enjoyment of work, through relationships that last throughout one’s career. Hospitality and generosity are some of the key values the characterize the kinds of relationships we hope will form within our network of scholars. We hope that people will benefit from both learning from others and also sharing their gifts with others.
Our strategy is to focus on three key areas that provide leverage to interdisciplinary scholarship on themes related to (a) virtue and character, (b) positive psychology, and (c) existential and cultural themes associated with human limits. We are currently developing a strategy document. For now, suffice it to say that these are three areas where typically people have to wait until later in their careers to start learning to work across disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, it can be hit or miss whether teams learn to move from parallel play to a more generative form of collaboration in which “iron sharpens iron,” and scholars sharpen their work through giving each other greater awareness of potential methodological assumptions and limitations.
Interdisciplinary measurement-forming teams that place strong measurement papers informed by interdisciplinary conceptual work
Interdisciplinary meta-synthesis-forming teams that place field-shaping papers in top outlets
Culturally robust knowledge-issues of generalizability, open science, and testing knowledge across subcultures and cultures.
Our goal for 2024 involve the following:
Develop an advisory board that includes not just grant-active research labs and centers, but also institutional partners who can help us clarify a plan to leverage local resources for the sustained benefit of early career scholars within the network.
