Week 12

Building off of the preparations I made last week, this week was all about preparing my research method materials. I spent the majority of my time organizing the sequence I would like my studies to go in as well as the actual materials and questions that will be used in the studies.

I decided to do introspective and self-reflective methods for primary research. This means that I will be doing a Touchstone Tour (observational study), Expert Interviews, A diary study, and Interviews with stakeholders from the diary study. These overlap and progress from Decembber 9th until end of January. Below is the chart of an overiview of the different studies.

The Touchstone Tour is first and I created the questions that I will be asking. I want to ask 3 main questions:

• How do you match students with professors? What do you look for in a successful teacher student relationship?
• What methods do teachers/environment use to make students feel comfortable?
• What tools does the facility provide that encourages an adult to move past embarrassment or doubt on their learning ability?

The goal is to find out how the facility operates to create a warm learning environment and caters to the different needs of adult musicians.

I also created the materials for the Diary study. The Diary study will consist of 7 participants and they will all receive booklets that are the size of a half page so that it can easily be carried around with their instrument. The entries are around the event of playing their instrument whether that is practicing, lessons or ensembles. The first page inside as seen below runs through the instructions as well as the confidentiality parameters.

To keep everything confidential, I have the diaries numbered and the number corresponds to a person. Only I have access to that information and when I share any data analysis only the number of the participant will be shared. I still kept an option to put their name down in case they wanted to keep track of the diary.

The actual entry pages run through Before and After quick survey questions and then some reflection questions to be completed by the end of the day.

I want to tweak the design to make them more fun and engaging.

I also created a pre-screening survey in Google Forms that I can use to spread and recruit participants. I am hoping through Lucy Moses School so that I can make sure the participants are in the tri-state area.

Lastly, I started to compile questions I want to ask the participants after the diary study. These stakeholder interviews are important to get more context to my research study.

• What is the justification for this choice in the diary study?
• What is your connection to music?
• What made you choose this instrument?
• Why did you decide to start playing?
• Are you taking lessons? Are you self taught? Are you in an ensemble? How did you find the information you needed to learn?
• What are your goals when it comes to music?
• What obstacles or challenges have you encountered while playing?
• What keeps you motivated to keep practicing and playing?

I then had a meeting with Ahmed whoe helped me finalize all my questions and answer questions I had about the presentation in class. I created the presentation which can be found here.