Watching the data roll in
Hi everyone, it’s me Claire again! I’m here to update ya’ll on how my data collection (and the rest of the internship) is going.
First of all, I am so grateful that my study is a purely online one — it makes data collection an absolute breeze! My study has been up on SONA for two weeks and 103 people have already done it — out of the 200 participants that we need. Ahh the joys of an online study. If it keeps going at this rate, hopefully all the data will be collected by Week 11! Thank God for those last-minute people who don’t collect their SONA points until the second half of semester. My study being online also means that it’s so accessible and easy to do.
However there was a little hiccup at first due to my unfamiliarity of the SONA systems. So SONA kept sending me emails that said “you have __ uncredited timeslots awaiting researcher action”. So I logged onto SONA to see the uncredited timeslots and they had the options to grant credit, mark it as excused or un-excused no-show or to not take action. In the end I concluded that these were the participants who had done the study but had not been granted credit yet — because why else would there be the options to grant credit? Also that was how they granted credit to participants for face-to-face studies.
I was wrong. I had sent an email to my supervisor Kate at around 10pm that night first asking her what to do with those timeslots and then another email telling her that I had granted the participants their well-deserved SONA points. Much to my dismay, I looked at my phone the next morning and saw the preview of her reply starting with “No, please don’t grant those participants points…”. Basically those participants were the ones who signed up to do the online study but hadn’t done it yet. Kate said that the points are automatically granted after they finish the study and that the researcher didn’t have to do anything. We also only had 100 points to give out since we need 200 participants — so I had wasted some of those points. The students must have been so confused (but also probably pleasantly surprised) that their points were granted without them having to do the study. Thankfully I only wrongfully granted credits to ten people — but I was still so peeved at myself!
I wanted to rectify the situation immediately and looked around on SONA to see if I could reverse the granted points. And I was so relieved that I was able to! Basically there’s a ‘modify’ option on the top right corner of the participant list page (for your reference if any of you are ever in this situation) that could allow me to change the option from ‘grant points’ to ‘no action taken’. And to make sure I reversed the points for the right 10 people I looked at the names of those who had their points granted at 10:47pm the previous night. I emailed Kate who then commended me on my problem-solving skills as she didn’t realise that the granted points could be reversed. But ooh that was a close one. I think this mishap taught me that even if data collection goes wrong, it’s not the end of the world — we would have just missed out on 10 people’s data. But I guess it is different when it’s not entirely OUR project — it’s our supervisors’ as well.
Needless to say I bought some Subway cookies for Kate for our following weekly meeting both as an apology and a thanks for putting up with a research intern like me :)))
Anyway, on a side note I’m astonished at the quality of the proposal drafts that I had to review! But I’m not too surprised since I know that everyone in this course is so driven and motivated to do well.
Wishing everyone luck in data collection, report writing and presentation preparation,
Claire :)
