This proposal requests funding to continue and extend the highly successful program of Summer Institutes in Social Psychology. First offered in 2003 and then biennially, the Summer Institutes in Social Psychology are designed to provide graduate students with two weeks of intensive instruction from leading senior scientists in social psychology, as well as to foster professional development and scholarly collaboration among these early-career professionals. Social psychology has become an increasingly specialized, theoretically complex, and technologically demanding science. Individual doctoral programs cannot span the broad range of concepts, content areas, and methodologies that define the field''s cutting edge. By providing intensive instruction about both advanced concepts and methods to young scholars who are beginning their research careers, the Summer Institutes will enhance the quality and impact of research being conducted throughout the field. With the participation every two years of approximately 80 of the field''s most promising graduate students, this enhancement effect will be extensive, widespread across topical areas within the field, and long lasting. Furthermore, the networking and communication functions of the Summer Institutes have already been demonstrated to foster collaborations across laboratories, universities, borders, and interest areas, an approach to scientific research that will undoubtedly become increasingly important in the future. This proposal seeks funding to conduct and evaluate the Summer Institutes that will be held in 2009 and 2011, as well as to continue monitoring the effectiveness of the earlier Summer Institutes.
This grant provided funding for two sessions of the Summer Institute in Social Psychology (SISP), one held at Northwestern University, in July, 2009, and the other held at Princeton University, in July, 2011. SISP is an advanced two-week intensive training program that was established to provide depth and breadth in the training of the field's next generation of scientists. Theories and methods in social psychology have become significantly sophisticated, complex, and rigorous in recent years. It is increasingly difficult for a single graduate program to keep pace with the field's rapid advances, adequately informing graduate students about the field's many topics, theories, and research paradigms, and preparing them for the sort of interdisciplinary research teams that characterize cutting-edge science. SISP expressly addresses these gaps through its coursework and through the communication networks that are established among students and instructors. This training provides instruction, supervision, and mentorship about cutting-edge theories and research, as well as innovative methods and data-analytic tools. The goal is to provide graduate students in social psychology access to the leading scholars internationally and stimulate collaboration among cohorts of students. A total of 160 graduate students participated in these two summer schools, each enrolling in one of 10 different substantive courses and 6 different methodological workshops. Students were diverse in their personal attributes and backgrounds, scholarly interests, and home universities. They were instructed by 26 leading scientists in social psychology. Evaluations of the program were outstanding: On a 1 (poor) to 9 (excellent), students rated their SISP courses at Northwestern and Princeton with an average rating of 8.0, and rated the overall SISP experience as 8.6. Considering these students along with students from the three prior SISPs, also supported by the NSF, it is clear that the summer schools have made important contributions to the development of young scholars in social psychology. SISP students have begun to establish themselves as leading young scientists in social psychology at universities around the country. Many of these young scholars have made impressive starts to their scientific careers, as evidenced by their success in achieving faculty positions, obtaining research grants, and publishing important new research in leading journals. Our evaluations of the scholarly productivity of these individuals suggest that participation in SISP was instrumental in their success.
