Using Social Networking to Advance Psychological Research and Teaching

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This project is designed to enhance the Social Psychology Network (SPN), an active website that offers searchable databases, a directory of social psychologists and other professionals, web-based data collection, online forums, and extensive teaching resources. The proposed activities will incorporate Web 2.0 technologies to enhance its social networking capabilities. A strong case can easily be made for the importance of SPN. For example, within a 24-hour period, the SPN pages are viewed more than 70,000 times by individuals in over 100 countries, and the SPN databases are searched more than 1200 times. Indeed, the PI's efforts with SPN were recognized with the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's distinguished service award. As such, the current SPN site greatly enhances the infrastructure of not only social psychology but of many social and behavioral sciences as well. The project will use Web 2.0 technologies to transform the Social Psychology Network into a fully featured social networking service designed specifically for researchers, educators, and students interested in social psychology. Specifically, the project will involve eight components: (1) adding options that allow users to customize SPN's layout as they wish; (2) developing SPN's eInterview.org partner site so that researchers can use it to collect interview data via the Internet; (3) changing SPN Profiles to a tabbed format that permits users to post multimedia content, upload files to store or share, and add new categories of content; (4) giving profile holders the option to link their profiles to "colleagues" and establish user-defined groups based on common research interests, career level, geographic location, or other attributes; (5) making it possible for site visitors to "subscribe" to SPN Profiles or request alerts that notify them when content of interest is posted in the Network; (6) setting up a community blog to hold discipline-wide discussions about questions of general importance to the field; (7) establishing a Collaboration Forum to help bring potential research collaborators together; and (8) developing an Application Program Interface that allows other programmers to create software applications for use in the Network. To complete the proposed work, SPN will hire an Associate Director with expertise in social networking, and it will appoint an Advisory Board to ensure that SPN meets the needs of the field and stays connected to other professional organizations. In this way, the project will not only fulfill NSF's intellectual merit criteria by advancing the field, but it will have broader impacts by enhancing the infrastructure for social science research and education.