PROCESSES LEADING SELF-IDENTIFIED HETEROSEXUALS TO DEVELOP INTO SEXUAL MINORITY SOCIAL JUSTICE ALLIES: A QUALITATIVE EXPLORATION

The impact of homonegativity on both sexual minorities and heterosexuals is profoundly debilitating. Due to the implicit power of their privileged status, heterosexually-identified individuals can serve a crucial role as allies in eliminating sexual minority oppression. Because minimal research exists around heterosexual identity issues, broadly, and sexual minority ally development, specifically, it is difficult to promote such ally work without a clear understanding of the developmental processes and motivational issues that lead heterosexuals to sexual minority social justice action. The current study sought to explore the developmental experiences of heterosexuallyidentified exemplars who work in their communities for sexual minority social justice. The present investigation was conducted through interviews with 12 individuals who demonstrated commitment to sexual minority volunteer work. Through the use of a discovery-oriented interviewing methodology, participants revealed the paths they have taken as they committed to social justice ally work alongside sexual minority activists. The qualitative data collected were subjected to a systematic, collaborative analysis by a team of researchers. The results revealed six general themes that arose from these participants stories, and specified subcategories within each domain: Early Family Modeling (positive modeling and negative modeling), Recognition of Oppression and Privilege (recognition of LGBT individual oppression, recognition of the oppression of others, recognition of oppression directed at oneself, recognition of ones own privilege, and recognition of others privilege), Response to Recognition (emotional reactions, taking responsibility, and behavioral reactions), Impact of Values/Attitudes (equality, attitudes about sexual orientation, personal responsibility, valuing diversity, and religious/spiritual beliefs), Reactions to Ally Work from Others (positive support from family/friends, negative reactions from local community, positive reactions from local community, positive reactions from LGBT community, and negative reactions from LGBT community), and Rewards from Ally Work (making a difference, friendships and connections, and other rewards). These findings highlighted key elements that contribute to the development of sexual minority allies. Interdependence with and empathy for others were vital elements of this growth. These often developed from encounters with otherness and led to greater involvement with social justice action. Finally, homophobia was revealed as a significant barrier to ally identification. Methods for cultivating developmental experiences are outlined

Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201

Cyber security fear appeals:unexpectedly complicated

Cyber security researchers are starting to experiment with fear appeals, with a wide variety of designs and reported efficaciousness. This makes it hard to derive recommendations for designing and deploying these interventions. We thus reviewed the wider fear appeal literature to arrive at a set of guidelines to assist cyber security researchers. Our review revealed a degree of dissent about whether or not fear appeals are indeed helpful and advisable. Our review also revealed a wide range of fear appeal experimental designs, in both cyber and other domains, which confirms the need for some standardized guidelines to inform practice in this respect. We propose a protocol for carrying out fear appeal experiments, and we review a sample of cyber security fear appeal studies, via this lens, to provide a snapshot of the current state of play. We hope the proposed experimental protocol will prove helpful to those who wish to engage in future cyber security fear appeal research