Bridget McHugh

Bridget McHugh, PhD, serves as a Psychometrician for the Assessment Services program. Bridget’s work focuses on creating valid and reliable high stakes written assessments for employees and students in the skilled trades. This includes serving as the PI for the Ohio’s Career Technical Education programs’ large-scale testing system, as well as consulting for nationally recognized credentialing agencies for skilled tradesmen.

Before joining the organization, Bridget created assessments for Fortune 250 companies such as CSX Transportation and for large government organizations. In addition to her experience in creating measures of hard skills, she has also created tests for soft skill development with the Fisher College of Businesses’ Leadership Initiative and researched the impact of emotions and coping in the workplace. As a specialist in statistics, she has also used her background in advanced data analysis to analyze and track trends in longitudinal data.

PhD, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of Central Florida, 2016

• Assessment
  • Credentialing Assessments
  • High Stakes Assessment
  • Large-scale testing
• Educational Assessment, Testing, and Measurement
  • Differential Item Functioning
  • Longitudinal Data Analysis
• Educational Statistics and Research Methods
• Vocational Education
• Workforce Development and Education
  • Career Technical Education
  • Certification

Dr. Bridget McHugh’s work focuses on valid assessments for education, training, and credentialing purposes. Her research currently centers on how to improve the efficacy of assessments for job-relevant skills. Her past work also focuses on how to analyze longitudinal data sets, especially within a diary context.

Technical Testing Project (Ohio Department of Education)

Joseph, D. L., Dhanani, L. Y., Shen, W., McHugh, B. C., & McCord, M. A. (2015). Is a happy leader a good leader? A meta-analytic investigation of leader trait affect and leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(4), 557–576. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.04.001

McHugh, B. C., Wisniewski, P. J., Rosson, M. B., Xu, H., & Carroll, J. M. (2017). Most teens bounce back: Using diary methods to examine how quickly teens recover from episodic online risk exposure. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134711

McHugh, B. C., Wisniewski, P., Rosson, M. B., & Carroll, J. M. (2018). When social media traumatizes teens: The roles of online risk exposure, coping, and post-traumatic stress. Internet Research, 28(5), 1169–1188. https://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-02-2017-0077

Berryman, C., McHugh, B., Wisniewski, P., Ferguson, C., & Negy, C. (2019). User Characteristics of Vaguebookers versus General Social Media Users. In G. Meiselwitz (Ed.), Social Computing and Social Media. Design, Human Behavior and Analytics (pp. 169–181). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Agha, Z., Anaraky, R. G., Badillo-Urquiola, K., McHugh, B., & Wisniewski, P. (2021, July). ‘Just-in-Time’Parenting: A Two-Month Examination of the Bi-directional Influences Between Parental Mediation and Adolescent Online Risk Exposure. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 261-280). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

McHugh, B.C. & Joseph, D.L. (2013). The substantive validity of self-report emotional intelligence measures. Poster presented at the 28th Annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, Houston, TX. 

McHugh, B. C., Dalal, S., & Joseph, D.L. (2014). The measurement of discrete emotion regulation. Poster presented at the 29th Annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, Honolulu, HI. 

McHugh, B.C. & Joseph, D.L. (2015). Weight discrimination via SNS: Perceptions of overweight applicants’ Facebook profiles. Poster presented at the 30th Annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

McHugh, B.C. & Joseph, D.L. (2015). Media richness and attraction: Personality affects attraction to virtual jobs. Poster presented at the 30th Annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Cox, B.D., McHugh, B.C., Cotton, J.D., Perry, K., Hatfield, J.D., Greene, C., Naggiar, E., & Hurd, J.M. (2016). Armed and able: I/O Psychology in armed positions. Panel presented at the 31st Annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, Anaheim, CA. 

McHugh, B.C., Wisniewski, P., Xu, H., Rosson, M.B., & Carroll, J.M. (2016). Doing more harm than good? Parental mediation of teens following cybersecurity risks. Poster presented at the 7th Annual Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference, Orlando, FL. 

McHugh, B.C., Wisniewski, P., Xu, H., Rosson, M.B., & Carroll, J.M. (2016). Reducing PTSD symptoms in adolescents exposed to online risks using active coping. Poster presented at the Society for Research and Child Development’s Special Topic Meeting: Technology and Media in Children's Development, Irvine, TX. 

Wang, Y., McHugh, B. C., & Austin, J. (2020). Rasch and traditional approaches to credentialing examination job-task analysis: A comparison. Presentation accepted for 2020 Annual Conference, National Council on Measurement in Education, San Francisco, CA, US. (Note: This presentation was cancelled due to COVID-19)

Austin, J. T., & McHugh, B. C. (2020). Accredited credentials: Why are they better? Presentation given at the 2020 NICE K12 Cybersecurity Education Conference (Virtual).

Berenbon, R.F., & McHugh, B.C., (2021). Subject matter experts’ judgments of item writing difficulty predict item characteristics. Presented at the 2021 Annual Conference, National Council on Measurement in Education (Virtual).

McHugh, B.C. & Berenbon, R.F. (2021). Using Differential Item Functioning Analysis to Detect Group Differences in Job Analysis Survey Data. Presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the International Personnel Assessment Council.