Thesis and Dissertation Advisors - African American Studies

PROF. B. COLLINS
Social Psychology - Research Methods

PROF. COLLINS is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UCLA. His numerous publications cover social psychology, applied social psychology, research methods, attitude change, persuasion, and social influence, Dissonance Theory, the design and evaluation of questionnaire measures, interviewing, health education, and community-based participatory research. These publications use a wide variety of statistical analyses. He served as Director of Research at Healthy African American Families II. He has taught at Yale and Stanford and was a Prof. of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He has written a textbooks on social psychology and research methods. He coauthored a book on Theories of Attitude Change. He has served and chair and vice chair of the human subjects protection committee (IRB). He has been an advisor for over a hundred undergraduate honors theses and MA and PhD theses. He has served as a social-psychology expert witness in court cases. His BS and MA were in communication at Northwestern University. He has focuses on one-on-one mentoring on activities ranging from: (a) the choice of a research topic that is relevant to the interests and skills of a particular student, (b) the identification of the most relevant theories, (c) the development of hypotheses, (d) research design, (e) the organization of research writing, (f) methods sections, (g) data analyses and the presentation results, and (h) the interpretation of results.
E-mail:
bcollins
at
dissertationadvisors.com

Research Interests

Applied Social Psychology
Close Relationships
Communication
Culture/Ethnicity
Ethics/Morality
Health
Interpersonal Processes
Person Perception
Persuasion/Social Influence
Prejudice/Stereotyping
Research Methods/Assessment
Self/Identity

Services for psychology graduate students and researchers:

Provide you with customized tutoring in all aspects of a research project that is tailored to your interests and skills.
Help you select and formulate solid research questions (hypotheses).
Help you learn to use literature searches and reference tools.
Identify a strategy and keywords for your literature search.
Help identify the most relevant theories.
Provide theoretical guidance on content.
Help identify the most relevant prior research.
Assist with literature review searches.
Provide recommendations regarding structure, organization, arguments, and ideas.
Suggest research designs.
Help with writing the methods section.
Suggest specific statistical tests of your hypotheses.
Tutor you in the use of statistical packages to conduct your statistical analyses.
Conduct statistical analyses and help prepare tables and graphs.
Tutor you in writing your conclusions in clear English (within ethical boundaries).
Help with the interpretation of results.
Revise for clarity, precision, and conciseness.
Incorporate input from degree-granting institution’s advisors/mentors and committee members.
Prepare you for your oral defense and/or comprehensive exams.

Additional Information >>

DR. VICKI LAWRENCE

African American Studies - Data Analysis

Dr. Vicki Lawrence is an academic researcher who studies the epidemiologic nature of social conditions in relation to cardiovascular and other disease outcomes. More specifically, her work focuses on studies of poor health among African Americans and health disparities that may occur my age, race, and gender in cardiovascular and mental health outcomes. Utilizing her background in epidemiology and biostatistics, she has provided statistical support on multiple studies with various investigators commonly focused on physical and mental health data. In addition, she has worked with clinicians, research investigators, and tutored multiple graduate students as well in public health, epidemiology, social work, medicine, education, and nursing to tackle statistics related issues.

Dr. Lawrence takes a significant amount of effort to ensure the students and researchers she collaborates with or supports understand the theoretical rationale behind the methods appropriate for their research problems, meeting the students and researchers at their stage of understanding. In addition to explaining the foundations, she regularly provides each individual has the opportunity to ask questions, and explains the differences in statistical approaches as needed. Further, she can help develop data analysis plans, refine research questions, and examine data collection methodologies with clients as well.

In her own work, Dr. Lawrence has used exploratory/ descriptive analysis tools (such as t-tests) and nonparametric tests, ANOVA (including one way, two way, repeated measures and others), structural equation modeling, exploratory factor analyses, multilevel models, linear regression, logistic regression, multinomial regression, and growth curve modeling as well. She has prepared analytical methods sections for publications, including tables of regression outputs. Further, she can provide information relevant to epidemiologic methods, including prevalence, incidence, risk and rate ratios, causal diagrams (including mediating and moderating variables) and other topics as needed. She has used a variety of data sets of both large and small magnitude, including nationally representative public data sets such as NHANES and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, but has also used survey as well as medical systems based data. She has substantial experience using SAS and Excel, and also uses HLM and SPSS.

Compiling and Managing NHANES Datasets

Data Collection Methodologies for Health Research Projects

Additional information >>

SUZANNE MANNESS

Specialist in APA, AAA, Harvard and Turabian Documentation.

SUZANNE MANNESS is an English professor specializing in technical and business writing. She has written and edited technical manuals, informational brochures, business proposals, and grants. She has also written computer user manuals and technical instrumentation directions. Additionally, she has edited many medical textbooks and medical articles on such subjects as heart transplants, pain management, and anesthesiology. She is an expert in all documentation systems such as Chicago Style, Harvard, APA, American Anthropological Association, and MLA. Her specialty is taking complex material and translating that material into a clear, concise, audience-friendly document.

Technical writing and editing
Academic/scholarly writing and editing (theses and dissertations)
Formatting specialist: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, Harvard, AMA, and AAA.
Recommended by Nova Southeastern University, Capella, Walden, The University of Phoenix, and Northcentral University
Thesis and dissertation advising

"Suzanne was excellent at helping me organize my dissertation chapters so they made a clear and concise argument. She has excellent writing and organizational skills and can conceptualize arguments extremely well. One of her strongest attributes is her knowledge and experience with International dissertations (U.K). She knows how to get the job done and has excellent turn around time!" -- Deborah M. Moscarelli, Assistant Professor, Central Michigan University, Department of Marketing & HSA

“Suzanne was incredible. She is friendly, patient, thorough, professional, and fast. He work was outstanding and I would not hesitate to recommend her to anyone.” – Rob Hauser, Capella University