The University of Iowa’s Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP)
is an eight-week program designed to provide undergraduate students from
underrepresented backgrounds with in-depth research experiences. As part
of the SROP program, you will conduct an independent research project
and will present your findings at a University of Iowa undergraduate
research conference. To help you accomplish this, our goal is to get you
set up as quickly as possible with our data so that you can formulate a
research question and hypothesis, identify and extract the relevant data
available, learn and perform the data analysis to test your question,
and put together an abstract and poster for the SROP presentation—all on
the eight-week timeline.
The following are lab expectations for SROP students:
You and Dr. Petersen will have a weekly one-on-one meeting to ensure
you are making progress on your independent research project
You will attend weekly lab meeting
Whenever you are not in a SROP program meeting, you will be working
in the lab (during regular business hours; 9am–5pm Monday through
Friday)
You will let us know, in advance, if you will be late to your
scheduled shift or will not be able to make your scheduled shift
3 Resources
The focal project of the lab’s work is an ongoing longitudinal study,
the School Readiness
Study, that follows children from 3–7 years of age to better
understand how self-regulation and externalizing problems develop, from
a bio-psycho-social perspective. For more information on the study, you
are encouraged to read papers from the project, view the available
measures, examine the Data Dictionary, and see the pre-registered
hypotheses. These resources are available on the project page for the School Readiness Study. For
information on how to conduct data analysis, see the relevant sections
of the lab’s Data Analysis guides on SPSS
or jamovi.
