Colleagues,
Please feel free to forward the attached announcement for a Postdoctoral Fellowship position at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. The position entails involvement in the following projects, among others (see attached for additional details):
MetaBUS: MetaBUS (http://www.metabus.org/) is one of 14 projects to win the 2013 Digging into Data Challenge, an international consortium of 10 research funders seeking to explore how computationally intensive research methods can be used to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world. MetaBUS is funded by the National Science Foundation (U.S.), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), and the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business (Canada). The MetaBUS team is comprised of psychology, management, and computer science scholars who are devising a web application that will (1) enable the automated encoding of millions of individual findings in a multidisciplinary social science research domain, (2) facilitate complex analyses, and (3) provide open access to members of the scholar community. Coupled with technological enablements and efforts to expand the scope of the project's deliverables, MetaBUS will lead to an eventual goal – a search engine of research findings that that is updated continuously and provides instant empirical summaries through a variety of dynamic queries and graphical user interfaces.
Synthetic Validity: The objective is to create a working synthetic validity system. Synthetic validity is a six decade old endeavor to create personnel selection systems on the basis of a job description alone. In 2010, the professional association Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology (SIOP) dedicated to the topic an issue of their journal Industrial Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice. Based on a collaborative open review process from leading researchers and practitioners, their conclusion was that synthetic validity was now possible to achieve and extremely desirable. For example, Bartram et al. (a group representing the Institute of Work Psychology and the selection company SHL) wrote, ''We strongly support the principle of synthetic validity and agree with much of the focal article, seeing that form of validity as the only general approach for the future.'' This project will include not only the development of a fully functional synthetic validity system but the accurate estimation of the expected effects of its adoption on national productivity, such as how it can improve performance, reduce education costs, increase years of employment by minimizing false first steps, and reduce turnover in jobs and unemployment rates.
Please direct questions about the position to Dr. Piers Steel (piers.steel@haskayne.ucalgary.ca).
Best,
Frank