Misc

We recently ran a little study to see what happens when you prevent a small group of students from using their smartphone for 24 hours. Participants were instructed to place their smartphone in a secure evidence bag. So what happened? Well not much really, they missed their smartphone.  As part of this study, we also asked participants to complete the Smartphone 'Addiction' Inventory (SPAI). Interestingly, a few participants who dropped out later in the study had fractionally higher SPAI scores. This may indicate that smartphone ‘addicts’ were unable to fully participate in the study and so discontinued, thus affecting our findings. However, this is unlikely given that smartphone addiction scales  do not align favourably with objective behaviour . It is worth noting that while this small number of participants were slightly more anxious at time 1 they were also on average, a bit happier. It's increasingly difficult to know exactly what these 'addiction...

Competition for graduate jobs is tough with around  85 people competing for each position.  When it comes to recruitment, graduate schemes typically include a written application, Psychometric tests and several interviews.  Taken alone, it's easy to be critical. Applications are often  read by s oftware, Psychometric tests and Assessment Centres are closed source and interviews are a mixed bag at best . Nevertheless, they can be effective when combined. No method is perfect, so it makes sense to use more than one methodology when attempting to draw solid conclusions about an applicants suitability for a specific role. But what about PhD recruitment and retention?  It seems odd that a fresh faced graduate can be awarded funding to complete a PhD or even accepted onto a masters degree with very little pre-screening. A funded PhD is comparable to a graduate job because it pays roughly the same and involves a huge amount of work and dedication. So h...