APA Program Committee Report

The APA program is coming along nicely and is almost finalized. As I reported
earlier, we had a large committee of reviewers (about 18), each of whom ended
up reviewing about 5-6 submissions. We had a large number of submissions: 6
symposia, 2 workshops, 1 discussion, and 1 conversation hour. In addition, we
had 12 paper submissions and 34 poster submissions.

As you may also know, Tammy Allen and I worked out a new initiative this year
that allowed people who were submitting their work to the SIOP conference to
indicate if they wanted their work to be considered for presentation at APA if
there was not room for them on the SIOP program. The idea was to increase the
number of SIOP members who would consider presenting at APA, and
simultaneously avoid the need to duplicate reviewing and the inevitable
mismatch of timelines between SIOP rejection notification and the APA
submission deadline.

As a result, several hundred SIOP submitters indicated they would like their
material considered for APA. After analyzing the data, Tammy forwarded the
top "near misses" to me (about 70 posters and 15 symposia, workshops, etc.).
These were posters and symposia that missed acceptance by just a fraction of a
point.

Although we did not have room on the APA program to consider the symposia
(because of the restriction on our alloted number of program hours), we were
able to send out acceptance notices to the 70 poster submitters. The response
has been overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic and I have already received
(in just the last 2 days) commitments from about 25% of them to attend and
present their work at APA. I have given them a Jan. 15 deadline to respond to
the APA invitation, and expect to receive many more acceptances. As a result,
I think we will see a greater attendance at APA by SIOP members, which will
hopefully translate into more alloted program hours next year.

The only drawback to this new initiative is that all the submission
information re: the new posters has to be manually inputted into the APA
database by the program chair. This requires about 10-15 minutes per poster,
totalling an additional 10 hours or so of work... I have forewarned the
incoming chair, Chris Robert, about this and advised him to line up a graduate
or undergraduate assistant in advance so he will not have to do the work
himself next year.

The APA Program will also include an invited address by Christina Maslach, a
presidential address by Lois Tetrick, and a joint Social Hour with Division 5.