This project is funded by WatCACE
Grant recipient: Christine Logel, Social Development Studies
Project team: Christine Logel, Social Development Studies & Christopher Lok*, Department of Psychology
*Graduate student
(Project timeline: February 2015 to March 2017)
Project Summary
Remember how your heart raced before your first job interview? Most co-op students feel that every term. If they interpret this physiological arousal as nervousness, and believe that it will hurt their interview performance, their nervousness can increase, potentially causing the poor outcome that they feared.
This project tests a 30-second treatment guiding students to interpret pre-interview physiological arousal as adaptive and normal. Researchers approach students waiting for co-op interviews and “Pop-Up” with a “Nervousness is adaptive and normal” message or control condition. Preliminary data suggests that this can improve students’ sense of belonging in co-op, perceptions of their interview performance, anxiety, and change their beliefs about interview nervousness and interview skills one month later. Future studies will obtain and integrate additional measures of students’ interview performance as well test if the intervention can be done at check-in. If effective, this treatment could be implemented for all co-op students.
(Photo credit: Natalie Cockburn from The Daily Bulletin)
Questions Investigated
We tested a new paradigm in social psychological intervention delivery. In three studies, we examined whether a brief, strategically timed, and psychology theory based message could benefit co-op students going for job interviews. Minutes before students went for interviews we approached them and delivered our short, 30 second message. The goal of our message was to help students reinterpret their anxiety as an adaptive response, one where their nervous energy can actually help them during their interviews, rather than hinder them. In our third study, an additional “belongingness” component was added to the intervention message. So in addition to our adaptive nervousness message, we also tell students that they are not alone in their feelings of anxiety and that with time they will overcome the challenges they are facing.
While we used the co-op interview process to study the effectiveness of our pop-up intervention, theoretically it could work in other high stakes settings and contexts relevant to the educational domain. For example, teachers can deliver nervousness is adaptive and natural messages to their students right before a test or presentation to help students deal with stress and anxiety. Similarly, universities could approach students studying in libraries during exam periods and deliver a similar message to help them cope with the stress exams bring.
Findings/Insights
Data from studies 1 and 2 were combined and analyzed together. Analyses show that, relative to controls, students reported benefits after hearing our message. This included more positive impressions about their interviews, less anxiety, and more optimism about their future co-op terms. These effects emerged the strongest for White male students, but less so for minority and female students. We hypothesize that our message may not have been powerful enough to address the additional sources of threat minority and female students may experience while interviewing for jobs. As such, we revised our message in study 3 to also include a belongingness component. Additionally, we decided to only target first time co-op students in study 3. Since it is these students’ first co-op terms, we believe they will be feeling the greatest amount of nervousness and anxiety and our message would be most effective on them.
Study 3 is currently completing data collection. Following the new best practices in psychology research, we must obtain a larger sample size than in previous studies so that it will be clear to the field that any results did not emerge by chance.
Dissemination and Impact
- At the individual level: We have described this design and intervention with colleagues and students at Indiana, Stanford, U of Toronto, and Waterloo.
- At the Department/School and/or Faculty/Unit levels: Presented in research lab meetings.
- At the institutional (uWaterloo) level: We shared results of studies 1 and 2 at a talk organized by the Waterloo Centre for the Advancement of Co-operative Education (WatCACE) during a brown bag talk.
- At the national and/or international levels: The graduate student collaborating on this project described it in his application for scholarships and funding.
Implications
- Teaching: This project underscored how often and how intensely students feel nervous. Looking at student’s self-reports and their interactions with the research assistants shows that the nervousness is pretty intense. Waterloo has so many students in co-op and most programs don’t really address it in class. The students are going to interviews and it feels separate from what goes on in their classes. There aren’t many co-op students in my department, but there are students who will be doing interviews for summer jobs and, in my upper-year classes, for graduate programs and for full-time jobs. I think I can help them normalize their experiences to know that being super nervous isn’t a disadvantage – it’s a level playing field because everyone is nervous.
- Involvement in other activities or projects: WatCACE provided us with a data set containing information about interviews and their results over the last 4 terms. We had students start coding and arranging the data so we can analyze this data to see if there are any systematic trends in the data. For example, following STEM stereotypes, do female student get proportionately less interviews and job offers than their male counterparts?
-
Connections with people from different departments, faculties, and/or disciplines about teaching and learning: We work closely with the WatCACE department to get access to co-op students and the Tatham Centre. They have shared insights about the co-op and interview process that informed our theoretical predictions and study design. We learned a lot from them.
- During “brown bag” meetings hosted by WatCACE, we got a chance to meet others working on co-op improvement projects. These included faculty and students from the Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Engineering, and the Mathematics and Statistics departments.
- Talking to colleagues about the study, we learned that some of them are completely unfamiliar with how the co-op program works, so we had an opportunity to educate them.
References
Project Reference List (PDF)