Within & Between
Within & Between is a podcast about the methods and metascience of developmental science, cohosted by Jessica Logan and Sara Hart. Episodes cover data collection, data analysis, research methods, and open science, along with life in academia. The show is framed as a relaxed lab meeting where listeners do not have to do the readings or present. It offers practical discussion for researchers and students interested in how developmental science is conducted.
Episodes
S5E7: Secondary Data analysis - how to reuse data for a new purpose
There are so many ways to do science. One of them is to analyze data that you didn’t collect! In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about how to go about science-ing with secondary data: Where to find data, coming up with research questions, and how to write a grant when you’re planning on using secondary data. Finally, we talk about how to do open science when you’re working with data that’s alread
S5E6: What is Validity Anyway?
Understanding whether a conclusion in a paper you read or an experiment you run is a valid one is, well, let’s just say pretty important, and more than a little confusing. In this episode, we talk through the Big Four Validities (™): Internal, External, Statistical Conclusion, and Construct Validity. It may sound similar, but we promise this is more fun than your last research methods lecture! I
S5E5: Should I take statistics classes?
Sometimes grad students or people who are advising them will ask us if they should take extra statistics classes. Most programs require a few, and so they wonder what the benefit might be for spending the time, energy, and effort to learn even more statistical methods. In this episode Jess and Sara will describe what we think the benefits are of those classes, and what classes we think people shou
S5E4: What’s in a Job Talk?
Job Talks, they’re different from conference talks! Here, Jess and Sara talk about what we think is the most successful structure for a job talk; what to include and how long to spend in each area. We describe the purpose of this talk, and what you should think about when writing one. We provide some of our favorite tips for getting the talk ready to present. Hint: practice, practice, practice!Ema
S5E3: What is a postdoc and should I do one?
One question Jess and Sara get a lot is whether doing a postdoc is a good idea. Here, we talk about what a postdoc is, how long it lasts, and what kinds of jobs a postdoc can take on. We also describe what we see as the advantages and disadvantages of the position. We talk a bit about our past times as post docs, and what kinds of things you can do when you are there, and what kinds of grants are
S5E2: Staying Flexible
Well 2025 was a year with lots of uncertainty. Jess and Sara talk about how the funding landscape has changed for us, how it has changed our work, and how we are handling it (hint: it’s not great!). We go through ideas of how to pivot your work when there may not be new funding, and describe kinds of projects you can do with minimal outside funding. We expect that academia is going to be a bit dif
S5E1: Moving is Disruptive Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
No, you’re not having deja vu. It’s a different kind of two part episode, one that is two and a half years in the making. Sara has moved to a new institution! And just to one up Jess, she has also moved to a new country! Listen to hear her talk about what it’s like to move institutions as a (ahem) senior professor. What kinds of things do you have to think about across research, teaching, and serv
S4E12: Authorship
It’s no mystery that research papers are essential for academic work. What IS a mystery is how to figure out who should be an author on those academic papers and how to have conversions about it. In this episode, Jess and Sara go over some authorship roles, guidelines and rules that govern authorship in the field, and talk about different ideas of determining order of authorship. This episode was
S4E11: Revisiting Preregistration and Registered Reports
In this episode, Jess and Sara reckon with what the preregistration revolution means in developmental science. We first visited preregistration and registered reports in Season 3. Since then, we’ve been a part of many preregistrations and registered reports, and have reviewed and handled them as editors. Through that process, we’ve noticed that questions often come up about whether something is
S4E10: Moderation
What can we say about the often used and often confused statistical approach that is moderation? Quite a lot actually. In this episode Jess and Sara introduce the basics of moderation (aka statistical interactions) using absolutely no math (or very nearly absolutely no math). Listen to get a primer on the kinds of questions you can ask with moderation, and to get answers to common moderation que
S4E9: Common Data Elements? What are those?
Related to this podcast's interests in data sharing, this week Jess and Sara talk about common data elements initiatives. These are movements that are hoping to get all of the researchers in the same field or subfield to agree to a given set of assessments, measures, procedures, and/or reporting metrics (Think: Everyone who measures mother’s education would ask the same stem question with the
S4E8: LIVE EPISODE! So you measured something twice, now what?
Measuring change is our first ever LIVE EPISODE! Recorded at the Association for Psychological Science conference with a live conference audience! Over here in the developmental sciences, we are often trying to measure or predict how much people grow and change over time. To do that, we’ll sometimes measure a skill or ability twice (for kids, maybe that’s once near the beginning of the school year
S4E7: Mediation
Mediation models! At their core, mediation models explore the relations among three variables: A predictor, an outcome, and a secret third thing they call a Mediator. You’ve probably seen mediation models out there in the published literature, with folks testing paths, seeing if a relation is still there if a mediator is involved, or testing for an “indirect effect”. Jess and Sara talk about all o
S4E6: The hidden curriculum at academic conferences (part 2)
In the second part of our series on academic conferences, Jess and Sara talk through the unique vocabulary of conferences (the word plenary, by the way, means “fully attended by all entitled to be present”), and walk through a conference day. Conferences are set up for those of us who love being around big groups of people, so we also talk about how those who are more introverted or shy can get th
S4E5: The hidden curriculum at academic conferences (part 1)
One of the ways the research machine operates is through research conferences. Scientists present new work, hear about others’ work, and (maybe most importantly) network with one another. In the first of a two-part episode about conferencing, Jess and Sara talk about what research conferences are and why you might want to go. We talk through how we choose which conferences to attend, how to plan y
S4E4: Broader Impacts and Dissemination Plans
If a scientist learns something new about the world but doesn’t tell anyone, have they really learned something new? Telling people is precisely the point of a dissemination plan or broader impact statement that the Institute of Education Sciences or National Science Foundation asks for as part of their research grant applications. Federal agencies want you to share what you learn with the world
S4E3: Developing Research Questions
Developing research questions is one of the most challenging aspects of the research process. This one little statement reflects so much about the rest of your project or paper. Jess and Sara reflect on how they develop their own research questions, the challenges with research questions and secondary data, and how they help teach students to develop research questions in their own work. Spoiler a
S4E2: Fun with NIH’s Data Management and Sharing Policy
We love data sharing around here, and something exciting happened In January 2023: The NIH put into effect a brand new Data Management and Data Sharing Policy. Any grant submitted to the NIH must follow this new Policy, and each grant submitted will include a Data Management and Sharing Plan describing how the research team will comply with that policy. Have a listen as Jess and Sara describe the
S4E1: Moving is Disruptive
Since we last talked, Jess has moved institutions! In this episode, Jess and Sara discuss the ins and outs of her recent move and why she made the decision to go. We describe how a mid-career academic move is different from an early career one, the timeline of the hiring process when you do (and don’t) have a promotion as part of the offer, and some of the difficult nuts and bolts of moving. Learn
S3E11: The Annual Review
In most faculty jobs, the department or college asks you to stop and document what you’ve been up to for the past year. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about the institution’s goals for this annual review. We compare notes on what the evaluation packet looks like for our two programs, and we find that they are… quite different. Finally, Sara has the inside scoop on what happens after you turn
S2E10: Managing the Paper Queue
In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about managing all the manuscripts that they are working on. We talk about whether and how we keep track of those papers that are nearly done, partly done, or just an idea, and how that changes when you are a first author vs. a coauthor. We also talk about how we mentor students through the writing process, from idea through to finished draft. We’ll cover broad
S3E9: What is Heritability Anyway?
In this episode, Jess and Sara finally (Finally!) tackle the basic premise of behavior genetics. We talk about what kinds of research questions you can ask with genetically sensitive designs, describe what heritability is and what it’s not, and discuss just how it’s possible that scientists can use data from twin pairs to understand how much of the variance in some skill or behavior is due to gene
S3E8: Planned Missing Data - This Cell Intentionally Left Blank.
If you’ve ever had to deal with missing data, you’ve probably wished you could avoid it completely in the future. So why on earth would anyone design a study where data are missing on purpose? When you set up a project, there are actually several advantages to selecting a subset of people to skip assessments, items, or waves on purpose. Jess and Sara describe those designs here, and just what the
S3E7: Parts of a Grant Budget
Why do you write a grant? To get money to do some sort of project of course! But how do you figure out how much money you need? Through a grant budget! But what goes into a grant budget? All kinds of things that you might expect (e.g., cost of the materials you need) and some things that you maybe don’t (e.g., Indirect costs). How can I find out what those budget-y things are and what they mean? Y
S3E6: Preregistrations
Preregistration is writing down your idea for how you plan to collect and analyze your data _before_ you actually start collecting or analyzing it. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about the many benefits of preregistration, the differences between preregistration and registered reports, describe their experiences with it, discuss some resources, and (hopefully) put to rest some fears about the
S3E5: Trajectories have variance too!
Trajectory of heritability to the heritability of trajectories?
Measuring growth in skills and abilities over time is practically (maybe literally!) synonymous with developmental science. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about how static measurements of a skill can have different variance, and different predictors, from growth in that skill. After a general discussion, we dive into how that pla
S3E4: You are the search committee
In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about what it’s like to serve on an academic search committee. To those of you who are about to serve on a committee (maybe for the first time), we will take you through the whole process from writing the call to making the offer. Or those of you on the market this year, peek behind the curtain.
Every search is different! Things happen very differently from univ
S3E3: All about that LDBase
In this episode, Jess asks Sara to talk about LDBase, the data repository she has been building designed specifically to hold developmental science data. We discuss what LDbase is, what motivated her and her colleagues to start building it, what makes it unique, and how it works. Sara even describes several excellent resources you can find on the website that make data sharing easier.
Go see it fo
S3E2: What’s up with Els*vier?
You may have noticed that the cycle of academic publishing is pretty broken. Scientists give their research papers to academic journals for free, then the journal puts that work behind a paywall. Sometimes institutions will pay for a package of subscriptions to these journals, often costing millions of dollars. Jess and Sara talk about this cycle, and how institutions, journals, and individuals ha
S3E1: Methodologists? What are those?
In this episode Jess and Sara talk about the role of methodologist in developmental science, and how it’s different from a statistician. A methodologist is a content expert and a collaborator like any other, and we do our best work when we’re involved right from the initial planning stages of a project. Why? Because nearly every decision made in a research project can have implications for statist
Season ALMOST 3 : Burnout.
Well the spring 2021 semester is over, and - what is this feeling? We’re a little (a lot) overwhelmed. Jess and Sara describe their experiences, and theorize a bit about why it might be particularly bad right now. Is the pandemic over here in the US? What does that mean for our jobs? That feeling of one day more can sometimes be too much. We end by suggesting, maybe, we all need a break, and to gi
S2E14: Data Management Episode 2
The saga continues. In this episode we talk about the data management steps you’ll need to consider after you’ve collected your data. We talk a lot about data entry, including the science of how to do it well. We also discuss data merging, data cleaning, and the concept of “release” datasets. Finally, because it seems no episode is complete without Sara discovering something to be shocked about re
S2E13: Data management Episode I.
You might think “data management” is just getting data ready to share, but it’s so much more. In this episode, Jess and Sara talk about the expanded universe of data management. This is the first of a two part series, and focuses on some of the things you can do to help ensure you have good quality data before you even talk to a single participant. We talk about lots of fun data management tips an
S2E12: Nurture might be Nature
Turnabout is fair play in this episode as now Sara describes her new paper! Some developmental science research is focused on how the home environment is correlated (or co-occurs with) children’s skills, behaviors, or abilities. Sara explains that these correlations are also influenced by the shared genes between parents and their children, and that the genetic correlation may be inflating the tru
S2E11: Factor Scores
New Paper Alert! Jess and her colleagues have a paper in review about a particular statistical method that we see a lot in developmental science. Have you ever run a confirmatory factor analysis and then saved (or extracted) the factor scores, turning them into observed scores for use in another analysis? If you have more than one latent factor, the default method for extracting factor scores can
S2E10: Within and Between Bites
To celebrate hitting our 10,000 listens benchmark, Jess and Sara spend episode 10 discussing two listener questions. First, we talk about the decision to change or not to change your last name when you get married. It’s something many developmental scientists struggle with, and we talk about how (even though it feels unique) it’s not terribly different from other professions. Second, we discuss th
S2E9: P-P-P-Pre-Prints
Are you open-science curious? Ready to turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes happening in our field? Preprints are one of the most accessible steps in learning about, and might we even suggest embracing open science. To post a preprint, you put a digital copy of a completed paper online, somewhere others can read it. In this episode, we discuss the advantages of preprints, different ways t
S2E8: Stop, collaborate, and listen
Jess and Sara are both advocates for interdisciplinary science, and interdisciplinary science means collaborations! On this episode, we talk about why we love interdisciplinary science and why some departments would prefer a more focused line of research. We also talk about the life cycle of collaborations, how we start them, maintain them, and let them go.
Links from this episode:
The Hidden Curr
S2E7: Goal setting
New year, new goals! Goal setting helps keep you on task, helps you work towards bigger goals, and can help you feel more successful. But many of us really struggle with it (cough cough Jess cough cough). Sara walks us through the goal setting system she uses, how it differs by career stage. We talk about specifics including what to include in your long term goals (hint, only the things you can co
S2E6: A few of our favorite things
For the end of 2020, we asked our listeners to name a few of their favorite things - favorite things about being a developmental scientist, that is. Our unscientific analysis of themes includes: Developmental scientists can translate our work into other fields, it’s very applicable to our parent friends, that the methods we use are creative and complex, and that working with kids is a blast (they
S205: Lab management and structure
What does it mean to have a lab, and who is part of it? In this episode, Jess and Sara describe their experiences with different lab setups and structures, and how they manage their meetings with students, projects, and collaborators. We discover that Sara has been using a lab management and productivity tool secretly for years! Our systems for working with our labs, projects, and students are alw
S204: Inter-rater reliability
As the semester draws to a close, Jess wakes up in the middle of the night concerned not with completing her grading, but with measuring inter-rater reliability for coding schemes. Reliability can refer to the agreement among raters, or agreement among items. There’s a lot of online discourse right now around reliability, but most of it is focused around the former: agreement among items. Over her
S203: Academic online professional presence
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic in 2020 must be in want of an online presence. Jess and Sara describe why you need to be online, and their experiences with social media, professional networks, and creating websites (and that twitch isn’t just what happens to Jess’s eye after 6 straight hours on zoom calls). The episode ends with our top three suggestions for how to get invo
S202: Becoming a parent in academia
To be or not to be (a parent!) that is the question. One of our listeners reached out with a question about timing of starting a family during an academic career. Jess and Sara both describe their respective experiences with having children, how quickly they got back to work, and the pros and cons of the academic work-life balance.
Resources: In case you don’t know what yeet means either.
Thanks t
S201: Catching up from season 1
In which we welcome you back to a new season of the podcast. Jess and Sara catch up on pandemic work and life. We describe the subtle and sometimes not so subtle feeling of being underwater that seems to accompany this particular time, describe how our online teaching is going, and discuss the different ways we’re translating and incorporating anti-racism into our courses.
Resources: Many analyst
Season 2 Teaser
Did you miss us? Just a small teaser of Season 2! First full episode is out November 18!!
Episode 12: Why are we here? And let it go?
Jess and Sara get a bit meta this week (some things never change), and discuss why academia is even a job. We walk through a fun and nerdy thought experiment: Is the Curriculum Vita a list of manifest variable indicators of some sort of latent variable of academia? We discuss when and how we decide to leave a project lost in the woods. And think, for the first time in forever, about a project tha
Episode 11: Perfection, rejection, and impostor syndrome
There’s a close link between the concepts of Perfection and Impostor Syndrome, perhaps mediated (or moderated?) by experiences of rejection. In this episode, we discuss that link, and personify it as Sara helps Jess try to cope with rejection and encourages her to get some rejected manuscripts back under review*.
Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about develo
Episode 10: Revise and resubmit
In this episode we talk about rejections - paper rejections. Jess and Sara describe their emotional and not so emotional reactions to finding out whether a paper has been rejected, offered a revise and resubmit, or accepted. We also discuss how much we change a rejected manuscript before we send it elsewhere, how to craft a revision letter, and the urban legend of papers accepted on the firs
Episode 9: Our COVID follow up
In this episode, we revisit how we’re working during COVID. Topics include excellent desk space (Sara) or lack thereof (Jess), and how we are and are not balancing parenting and working at the same time. We also talk about preparing to teach at a distance, and whether we’re even allowed back on campus.
Resources: Vijay Sathy - On who benefits from a flipped classroom and how to make your teaching
Episode 8: Reviewing papers
Peer review is, for now, an essential part of the scientific process. Writing a good peer review is not easy, and we feel it’s rarely formally taught. We get no feedback on the process, so it’s difficult to learn. Listen to Jess and Sara talk about how they decide when to say yes to a review (and when to say no), how to schedule them into your work week so you don’t lose track, and what your job i
Episode 7: Reviewing grants
Grant information continues! This time from the reviewing side. Jess and Sara talk about the process of reviewing grants for the big three US federal agencies. The grant reviewing process is an elaborate, multi-step process, which we will outline and discuss. Listen to this if you’re curious what kinds of things your reviewers are doing when they get a stack of grants to review, or if you’re new t
Episode 6: Writing a paper: Processes, tips, and tricks for the (slightly) less organized
Writing is one of the loneliest activities. For some of us, it can be hard to keep yourself accountable, especially right now with not much of a regular schedule and lots of working from home. On this episode we talk about our paper writing process, how we go from an idea to a submission, and the wonders of co-writing. We are divided on the use of the phrase “dot-jot notes”, which google says is N
Episode 5: Grants, grants, grants!
It’s grant season! In this episode Jess and Sara talk about the way they approach writing grants. There are many different kinds of grants, so in this first grant-focused episode we briefly discuss the different funders for developmental science research, how to choose a grant mechanism to apply for, the general rules and process that we follow for any grant, and the critical role of ice cream.
Re
Episode 4: The what, why, how, and hesitations of data sharing.
Now required by most funding agencies, data sharing is gaining some traction in developmental science. Jess and Sara happen to love data sharing, but acknowledge that others may be more hesitant. In this episode we dive into some information about how to data share, and why if you try it, you may find out you love it too.
We mentioned a few data repositories, here are ICPSR, RE3Data, Databrary, an
Episode 3: Racism in the history of developmental science
This week, we tackle the history of racism in our specific developmental science fields. We believe that Black Lives Matter. We believe it’s our job to do the anti-racist work within our own departments and fields. In thinking about actionable steps we can each take to work be anti-racist in the academy, we first acknowledge that we are two white women who can not speak to the lived experiences of
Episode 2: Day to day life and the COVID response - Part 2
Jess and Sara continue the COVID discussion, talking about ideas for alternative ways to collect data during the 2020/2021 school year, the reasons NOT to collect data next year, and some alternative ideas for your research. For those of you who do intervention work, we also discuss some analytic options you have if, due to school closures or forced research lockdowns, you suddenly find yourself i
Episode 1: Day to day life and the COVID response - Part 1
In this episode, Jess and Sara describe how our labs operated pre-COVID, and how our sciencing has changed during the shutdowns. We also talk about the kinds of data we collect, and the different ways we collect it.
Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at withinandbetweenpod@gmail.com. More episodes and podcast information at Withinan
Episode 0: Who is Within & Between?
When one person asks for advice, you give it to them. When five people ask you for advice, you start a podcast.
In this introductory episode, we introduce our vision for Within & Between, tell you who we are, and give you an idea of what you can expect with Within & Between.
Connect with the podcast on twitter @within_between, or email us letters about developmental science at withinandbetweenpo
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