Small Group Research

One of my most recent papers, which I’ve spoken about most recently here, is now award winning work! My paper with Linda Argote and Brandy Aven on assessing TMS using group conversational data was selected as a co-winner of the Keyton-Brower Best Paper Award at Small Group Research. One of the benefits of winning this award is that the work is made Open Access for a year so everyone can access it: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10464964231182130

This selection was personally a bit awkward as I recently joined Small Group Research as an Associate Editor and voted on this award (though I did not vote for myself), but several of the other editors voted for my paper so the gracious thing seemed to be accept. This paper shared this year’s award with a very interesting paper from Rachel Amey, Kyle J. Emich, and Chad E. Forbes on communication and listening that used EEGs in a very interesting way. Please check that paper out as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10464964231175640

Also, if you are reading this and thinking about submitting work to Small Group Research, please do! It’s a great journal and I’m happy to chat if you’re not sure if it is a good fit: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/SGR

Lastly, apparently I never posted here about my Group Dynamics paper! I created a practical guide to conducting text analysis that was published last year, check it out: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fgdn0000204

Unobtrusive Measure of TMS Vignette

Below I provide a Vignette for conducting analyses similar to those we did in the Unobtrusive Measure of TMS paper. Using this, you should be able to take text that has been coded into 2 or more categories and create a dictionary of terms that could be plugged into LIWC.

The formatting is sometimes a bit strange when I embed the vignette so you can see the vignette by clicking here. If you’d like to download the RMarkdown file, you can find it here: Unob_Vignette

I hope this can be of use to someone. Please let me know at jkush@umassd.edu if you have any questions or suggestions! Special thanks to Saheer Shaik for his assistance.

The Unobtrusive Assessment of TMS Using Text Analysis

In the Summer of 2012 (or thereabouts) I was speaking with Linda Argote about what my next independent project would be. I talked with conviction that I thought, over the Summer, I could come up with some way of analyzing the discussion within a team to determine the strength of their Transactive Memory Systems (TMS). She gave me the sign-off to start that project, running parallel to data collection to what would turn into our 2018 paper in Organization Science.

After a number of twists, turns, setbacks, and improvements, that project has now been published as a paper in Small Group Research with my co-authors: Linda Argote and Brandy Aven. We develop and demonstrate the efficacy of a fully text-based measure of TMS. In our case, we analyzed the text of group conversations over an instant messanger, but I don’t have any reason to believe that there wouldn’t be some value in applying this measure to other types of group transcripts. One important thing to me was to make this assessment easy to use so, if you take a look at the Supplementary Materials, you’ll find the LIWC formatted dictionary files. I’ve started work on an R package to make the measure even easier to use but, if you have LIWC, you can use our measure.

LIWC-22 Dictionary File

LIWC-15 Dictionary File (due to the use of n-grams in dictionary, results may vary between LIWC-15 vs. LIWC-22)