Ph.D. Prep Panel
Connecting Research Ideas to Methodological Choices
Friday, January 23 | 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET
A core skill in developing a dissertation or research project is learning to align your research questions with the methods that allow you to answer them convincingly. This requires moving beyond a list of preferred techniques and instead tracing the logic from your theoretical aim to the design features that best capture the phenomena you hope to study. What kind of evidence would let you test your mechanisms? Do you need control, realism, or a way to capture change over time? Are you working at the individual, team, or organizational level, and what does that mean for measurement and sampling? The goal is to view methods as tools that flow naturally from a well-specified idea, which strengthens both the rigor and persuasiveness of the final project.
Dr. Samantha Anderson
Biography
Samantha F. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, focusing on Quantitative Methods. Broadly speaking, her research investigates questions pertaining to research design and meta-science, with a focus on developing approaches that are both rigorous and practical. More specifically, her work centers on themes including: (a) sample size planning for high statistical power, (b) methods for addressing replication, (c) missing data in randomized designs, and (d) the impact of multiplicity on Type I error rates, effect size bias, power, and heterogeneity. In an effort to make her work accessible and user-friendly, she has co-developed open-source software for conducting sample size planning, available at https://designingexperiments.com/shiny-r-web-apps/ under the heading “Bias and Uncertainty Corrected Sample Size for Power”.
Biography
Don Kluemper is professor and area coordinator for the Area of Management at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. Don has previously been a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was the director of the Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development (iLEAD); Northern Illinois University; and Louisiana State University. He received his PhD in management from Oklahoma State University in 2006 after a career as the director of human resources of a 250+ employee non-profit organization.
Don’s research interests center around personality in organizations, workplace mistreatment, leadership and research methods. Don has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, among others. In addition, some of Don’s research has been featured in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and National Public Radio. Regarding teaching, Don has taught courses at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels and has won various teaching awards.
Dr. Don Kluemper
Dr. Zhen Zhang
Biography
Zhen Zhang received his PhD from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in China. Before joining SMU in 2020, Zhen worked at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University for twelve years, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses of Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Cross-Cultural Management, and advanced research methods.
Zhen’s research focuses on leadership process and leadership development, work teams and groups, biological basis of work behavior, start-ups and entrepreneurship, and advanced research methods. His work has appeared in several leading management journals including Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Leadership Quarterly, and has been cited in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Globe and Mail. Zhen currently serves as Editor-in-Chief at Personnel Psychology (2023-2025).
Zhen’s consulting experience includes his work with a variety of companies and non-profit organizations including leading manufacturing companies in Germany, commercial banks, pharmaceutical companies, and research and development labs in China, as well as state and federal government agencies and Silicon Valley start-ups in the United States.
