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Early in one’s career in psychology, certainly starting in graduate school, if not sooner as a psych major in college, a choice point gradually emerges between seeking a career as a scholar, a scientist, and perhaps as an academic versus pursuing the life of a practitioner, one who applies the work of the former, the scholar. We faculty will often cast this choice in the form of a “tension” between science and practice. Ironically, I have never felt such tension. The purpose of this chapter is to explore choices we make in life and career, the consequences of these choices, and what we can learn in the process, that is, along the way and the implications for organization change and development.

Data visualizations in some form or another have served as decision-support tools for many centuries. In conjunction with advancements in information technology, data visualizations have become more accessible and more efficient to generate. In fact, virtually all enterprise resource planning and human resource (HR) information system vendors offer off-the-shelf data visualizations as part of decision-support dashboards as well as stand-alone images and displays for reporting. Plus, advances in programing languages and software such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, R, and Python have expanded the possibilities of fully customized graphics. Despite the proliferation of data visualization, relatively little is known about how to design data visualizations for displaying different types of HR data to different user groups, for different purposes, and with the overarching goal of improving the ways in which users comprehend and interpret data visualizations for decision-making purposes. To understand the state of science and practice as they relate to HR data visualizations and data visualizations in general, we review the literature on data visualizations across disciplines and offer an organizing framework that emphasizes the roles data visualization characteristics (e.g., display type, features), user characteristics (e.g., experience, individual differences), tasks, and objectives (e.g., compare values) play in user comprehension, interpretation, and decision-making. Finally, we close by proposing future directions for science and practice.

Disciplinary differences in approaches and methodologies to research present an important challenge to humanities practitioners wishing to engage in pedagogic research. This article outlines the development of a social sciences research methods workshop as an example of an intervention to provide a bridge for modern languages practitioners to engage with pedagogic research. The workshops have also raised questions about the capacity of UK higher educational institutions to provide research training for their staff at introductory levels, as well as identifying barriers to languages practitioners contributing to “generic” pedagogic research. Overcoming these barriers is a long term process, but in the shorter term the workshops are good way of raising awareness of social science research methods and offering a possible route into publishing pedagogic research which has an audience beyond the languages community.