The focus of this presentation broadly is on improving and promoting health, but my approach will be non-traditional. My academic career isn’t what I’d imagined when I was an aspiring graduate student. I had many publications coming out of grad school and was expected to seek out a job at a big research university. Instead, I took a job as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (3-3 load, lots of service, no TAs or doctoral students). I love teaching and this worked for my family. But it made being a prolific researcher a challenge. I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned about creating a healthy balance and the strategies that I used to make research work in this kind of setting. I’ll also focus on my primary research interests which involve using the media practice model to better understand how early life experiences and individual characteristics influence how young people use media (this includes the media they consume, how they identify with media personalities, and how media makes them feel) and how these factors subsequently influence attitudes and behaviors related to interpersonal violence. This research is meaningful because it has implications for early intervention (e.g., promoting critical thinking and media literacy to make young people more resilient to intolerant attitudes related to gender and sexuality).
Pam McAuslan is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in Social Psychology, Interpersonal Relationships, Gender, and Statistics, she has served in various roles in her 26 years at UM-Dearborn including as Chair of the Institutional Review Board, Director of the MS Psychology Graduate Programs, and Psychology Discipline Chair. Her primary research interests focus on factors related to interpersonal violence, particularly how the media practice model can be used to help us to understand how early lived experiences and individual characteristics influence media use (consumption, identification, and influence) and how these factors subsequently impact attitudes and behaviors related to violence. But her expertise in methods and statistics have led her to collaborations with colleagues across psychology and she has publications on diverse topics including substance use, parenting self-efficacy, mindfulness, self-promotion, and trust in autonomous vehicles.
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