Week 4: Problems and possible solutions

Hi lovely people! It’s week four and I’m back with more! 

If you’re keeping up with my blogs, you would know that I started my experiment last week, and noticed several interesting patterns and observations. Well, I’m continuing my experiments this week as well, but my target this week was to make sure the data I am getting is sensitively collected by participants and the results that I am drawing from this data representing my findings as accurately as possible. This is also a great learning opportunity for me: to learn from last week’s mistakes. I definitely don’t want to change/affect/manipulate  the results and I want to keep the test conditions constant for every participant so that the data I am collecting represents the real findings.

So let’s go over some problems I (attempted) to tackle this week:

1. Some participants would forget to record their data

          I anticipated that this would be an issue, which is why I decided to send reminders every Friday. However, this felt very last minute and also put a lot of pressure on both me and the participants. I decided to arrange weekly meetings with participants. I’ll contact them this week and next week to figure out their availability to make sure things run smoothly.

1. Lack of organization

It was definitely a challenge to organize all the data I was getting. I originally had a massive spreadsheet where I recorded everything, but I soon realized that was really ineffective and I need to stop being lazy… I spent my time this week making better ways to organize my data in folders, separating each factor of the study so I can independently analyze my variables. 

I planned to meet my external advisor to begin the case study aspect of this project, which I’m planning on beginning next week or the week after.

That’s it for this week and I hope to give you more to read next week!