Finally made it to the mid-sem break!

Janice here again with updates on how my project is going! Unfortunately I can’t say that much has changed since my last update :’( … I was really hoping that I could talk a bit more about how it’s been working with participants but we’re still in the stages of preparing to get the study completely ready! It should be up and running within the first week or two when we get back from the break though!

There have been a couple of hiccups in the past month, pushing back the start of the study:

1. Getting the acquisition items

The second task in my study requires 10 novel items to be presented to the participants, so that we can looking at the initial attachments to the new objects and how this may affect acquisition behaviour! It’s been a bit of a struggle collecting all these items as some of them had to be shipped in from overseas but the last item finally arrived last week!

Here are the items that we have for the task:

• A small generic rolling die

• A multi-coloured pencil

• Rainbow eraser

• Slinky

• Sticky hand toy

• Blank playing card

• Key ring

• Pocket tissues

• Smooth rock

• Marble

I was initially a bit hesitant about the acquisition task since we had said that the items we wanted to get should be of low value and limited utility, so I thought surely no one would really want the objects? But honestly, if I were a participant, I might take a few of these haha!

Like the sticky hand toy — who else used to play with these during their childhood?! I have no use for it except for throwing it onto the wall a few times before I get sick of it, but I still want it? Same with the blank playing card, I know it has no use at all but it just looks cool!

What do you guys think? Which, if any, items would you take?

2. Fixing up the Qualtrics survey

A couple of weeks ago, we had a run through of our Qualtrics survey which includes a bunch of questionnaires to measure measures of attachment style, object attachment, anthropomorphism and baseline depression, anxiety and stress. Since myself and the PhD student I’m working with were already quite familiar with the different scales, we always skipped over the questionnaires when discussing the study. However, during our run through, we realised just how tedious it was and how long it took to properly go through all of the surveys! So together with my supervisor, we had to decide which questionnaires to take out and which to keep in, depending on which factors we wanted to look at!

Last week, we had a meeting with another 3rd year research assistant who was going to be helping out with running the study. It was really nice to be able to explain the study to someone else who hadn’t been a part of it from the start — gave me an extra boost of confidence that I knew what I was talking about and it made sense outside of my head!

In other news, a couple of days ago, I handed in my research proposal draft to my supervisor! It wasn’t amazing and I wasn’t entirely happy with it yet, but we had agreed on handing it in on Friday so even if I was going to fix my proposal more, I thought any feedback is better than no feedback!

Because it’s the mid-sem break in the coming week, I’m going to try and take it easy — work on my research proposal to try and perfect it by Monday! (Good luck to everyone — I’m sure we’re all working hard on our proposals!)

In Week 10, I’m hoping to have the study finalised and then we can start getting some data in!! It’s been such a buildup of having to do those positive social interactions with the participants that I’m actually looking forward to it? Fingers crossed, we get a lot of sign-ups as it gets towards the end of semester and first years are still trying to get all those SONA points!

— Janice :)