Week 7: Parallel Parking and Survey Making

This week’s title may confuse you- but don’t worry, I’m also permanently confused. Over the last week or so, I’ve truly embarked on my journey to master the skill of driving. Easy enough, except I cannot for the life of me figure out how to park properly. I’m great at just about anything but that. And well, as any good driver knows, if you can’t park properly the first time, it turns into a whole bunch of little corrections, back and forth, until you finally nail the landing.

To be quite honest, this project is feeling a little bit like my subpar parking. Starting from the beginning, it’s been a series of little corrections to my trajectory. But not to worry, we persevere!

This week’s challenge was Prolific surveyors. Now, when I was setting up the survey, I noticed some nonsense about “collecting Prolific IDs.” I didn’t need any such thing, so I simply declined the option to collect. However, I did not realize that Prolific surveyors would have access to their IDs regardless! Thus, at the end of my own survey, when I asked surveyors for this userID, Prolific users gave me their Prolific ID, rather than the one that I specifically prescribed to them myself!

Now this was quite an issue. The userID I created was extremely specific and important for my study. I first thought of sending out a message to all surveyors. After doing that, I realized not all surveyors would be capable of finding the code again.

Thus I began my next quest, making a simple good survey to send out- a simple version of the game I made myself. This was not a difficult task, but rather completed quickly and efficiently. After depositing this information into Prolific again, I was able to collect more data on surveyors, this time without any issues. 

Next week, I’ll be finally compiling all the data into a readable version of my results. As we edge upon the finish line, it’s really time for me to get cracking on that paper!

I’ll see you all next week! Stay curious!