Secretary-Treasurer’s Report
Jennifer Pals Lilgendahl
I hope 2013 is off to a great start for everyone! It was great to see many of you recently at SPSP in New Orleans. We had a productive ARP Board Meeting on Sunday morning after the conference. We discussed exciting new plans and initiatives for the organization, many of which involve the new committees we have recently created (see Lynne Cooper’s Executive Officer Report for more details). For example, you can look forward to an updated website (long overdue!) and related improvements to your on-line experience of ARP. There were also productive discussions about how we interface with the media and communicate with the outside world. Will Fleeson, our president, had the excellent of idea of polling the membership for their ideas prior to our meeting. Thanks to all of you who took the time to share your suggestions! We received many creative and interesting ideas for different ways ARP could expand its reach and influence in the coming years. We will continue to mull many of these ideas over in the context of the appropriate sub-committees. Dan Morgan (Elsevier representative) and Rich Lucas (Journal of Research in Personality editor-in-chief) were in attendance for part of the meeting, during which we discussed how JRP might evolve to embrace the changing climate of the field toward greater transparency, ethical scrutiny of research practices, and support of replication research. Finally, we want to especially thank Dan Morgan for securing funds from Elsevier to help cover the cost of our Board meeting.
For the last P newsletter (Fall 2011), I reported that we had 319 active members on our roster, with 183 regular members and 127 graduate student/post-doc members. Unfortunately, our numbers have dropped to 227 active members, 169 regular members and 58 graduate student/post-doc members. This fluctuation is largely a function of the fact that we have our conference every other year; in 2011, we were enjoying the post-conference bump, particularly among our graduate student/post-doc members, many of whom let their memberships lapse during the off year of our conference cycle. We strongly encourage you to renew your memberships and to consider a multi-year membership when you do. While we maintain a very reasonable one-year rate of $50 for regular members and $35 for graduate students, we also offer financial incentives to renew your membership for multiple years. Regular members can renew for two years at $95 and for three years at $140, and graduate students and post-docs and can renew for two years at $60. Multi-year memberships make less hassle for you year to year and will greatly increase the financial and membership stability of the organization.
What are the benefits of being a member of ARP? In addition to being part of a vibrant community of personality researchers and the only organization solely dedicated to advancing personality science in the U.S., your membership benefits include subscriptions to two journals— Journal of Research in Personality (JRP) and Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS)— and reduced registration fees for the ARP conference, including the next one to be held this summer, June 16-18 in Charlotte, NC. Please be on the lookout for emails regarding registration for the conference. We hope to see you all there!