October 20, 2007

When people ask me what I’ve been up to recently, I feel bad. Not because I’ve been up to bad things, or because I’m not up to anything, but because what I’m up to isn’t interesting to about 99.8% of the population (moral judgment, orthodoxy, and social engagement, oh my!), so I give some stock answer like, “Oh, school, travel, work…you know.” I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a newlywed or what, but I guess people think my life’s a hell of a lot more exciting than it actually is. Not that my life is bad. Not at all, in fact, but ‘exciting’ isn’t a word I’d use to describe it. I generally get up anywhere between 7 and 8 a.m., drink coffee, watch The Today Show, get a shower, get dressed, go into work for a few hours, come home, lounge around, cook and/or eat dinner, read or write, maybe go to the gym, come home, watch TV, go to bed. On the weekends, I have even less going on, unless we have plans or are out of town. I feel like I have just enough to do, and I’ve settled into a comfortable routine. The spring semester will be particularly nice since I’ll only have 2 classes instead of 3. One is a class on moral development and theory, and the other is a class on structural equation modeling. Thankfully, the latter isn’t being taught by my last stats instructor, who shouldn’t still have a job.

Every now and then we shake things up, like when we went to a show at Jupiter on Thursday night (Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes) and stayed out until 1:00. We saw them in New Orleans last year and thought they were great. I kid you not, there were fewer than 20 people at the Jupiter, and only 6 of us were there deliberately to see the band. I felt so bad for them, but they put on a hell of a show. Cowboy Mouth is coming to Tuscaloosa on November 1st, and Scott and I have free tickets (courtesy of JP) to go to that show as well. I can’t imagine how they’ll do in such a tiny space (the Legacy? Are you kidding?), but I’m still looking forward to the show.

I also have a “hook” on my research study and everything is falling into place quite nicely. I’m hoping I can get all my materials submitted in time to do it by the end of the semester. Basically, I’ll be measuring participants’ moral judgment development (their scores on the Defining Issues Test), dogmatism (using the Altemeyer DOG scale…tee hee), and social engagement (using a set of questions from a Harris poll on intentions and actions in social responsibility). OK, now picture a box divided into four (think Political Compass). The DOG scale will be on one axis, social engagement on the other. My theory centers around which quadrants have which moral judgment scores. Later on, when I use this same format for a larger scale study (more people and possibly more questions), I can also try to theorize political orientation and see which factors most strongly correlate. I’m hoping that, ultimately, my work will be a very small step towards understanding (and mitigating) the effects of being raised in a super-orthodox, repressive environment. From what I’ve read thus far, it can be just as bad as being neglected or abused in terms of its effects on development.