Update: Changes to SPSP User Accounts and Email Subscriptions

To better serve our membership, SPSP has made several changes to the demographic questions and email subscription options. As we are gearing up for our 2022 Annual Convention, we know many members will be logging into their SPSP User Account. We encourage you to update your demographics and email subscriptions by logging into your SPSP account.

• Click “Demographics” on the right menu bar under “Account Actions.”
• Click “Email Subscriptions” on the right menu bar under “Account Actions.”

Demographic Changes

SPSP is committed to promoting equity and diverse representation across our programs. Collecting demographic information from members is a critical part of this effort. We are working with our Diversity and Climate Committee as well as other committees to make sure we are collecting data that will help us meet the needs of our members and advance their work.

Our overall goal with these changes is to collect data in a manner that helps SPSP gain a better understanding of our members and allows us to craft programs and services that meet the needs of all. We also want our questions to be inclusive and positive. Finally, the data needs to be collected in a way that allows us to identify trends over time, and identify potentially underserved minority groups.

Several resources were reviewed (e.g., federal (U.S.) surveys, higher-ed surveys, Pew Research Center surveys), and we decided to model most of our demographic questions on the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute’s (HERI) surveys, specifically its survey of first-year students. This survey has been conducted for over 50 years, involving millions of first-year students across thousands of universities in the United States. Using these data points will provide SPSP an opportunity to compare demographic representation across representative samples of undergraduates each year.

We recognize that many of our members are not from or not working in the U.S., and we have attempted, where possible, to offer response categories for some questions that capture cross-nation differences in titles/labels.

Email Subscription Changes

While we learn more about our members, we also want to make sure that they are receiving only the information that is most helpful. SPSP is consolidating our email subscription options to create a more seamless experience for members.

We can’t wait to see you, whether virtually or in person, during our 2022 Annual Convention from Feb. 16-19. Stay tuned for updates and don’t forget to respond to our call for submissions, beginning on June 29. Thank you for your committed support of SPSP and for joining us as we work toward building a more equitable and inclusive future for personality and social psychology.

Best,

Monica Biernat, President, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Rachel Puffer, Executive Director, Society for Personality and Social Psychology