Week 1: Setting Up My Project

Hello everyone! This is the one and only Joleen and I am back with another blog post! In today’s post, I will cover everything from gathering participants for my research project to explaining key terms necessary to understand the content of my project.

Before people begin any research, they need to gather participants. In this research project, I am looking to connect with about 30 women who are premenopausal or menopausal as participants. First, I designed flyers using Google Docs to put in public chats (such as WhatsApp and WeChat). My flyer includes my project’s purpose, goal, eligibility requirements, and benefits of my project. I sent them into multiple chats and gathered participants around the school. Next, I request that people interested fill out a Google Form to give me their contact information with the preferred time and location of the interview. Each of my participants will perform Qigong 5 days per week for a month. They will also be interviewed once before and after the study for approximately 30 minutes. Finally, I created a separate spreadsheet to keep track of all my participants and the times I am interviewing them. This way, I will know when to interview each participant for the second time.

My external advisor and I met to design two sets of interview questions that my participants will be answering. These are related to demographics and quality of sleep. Instead of creating these questions all from scratch, we copied and edited questions from existing research, such as the Fatigue Assessment Scale or the Pittsburg Sleep Index. However, for the questions specifically geared toward the project, we came up with questions to improve the study. After my participants answer these questions, I will analyze this data to draw conclusions.

My external advisor and I also compiled documents for participants to sign. These are legal documents and will ensure that collected data may be released. We obtained the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act authorization, written informed consent, and documents affirming the formal release of certain medical records in data collection. These documents are necessary to conduct research in an ethical setting.

That’s it for this week! Next week, I will show everyone the interviews and how I will do them!