Monroe Research Week Four - Halfway There!

(copied from http://upperclassmonroe.blogs.wm.edu/author/sckyle/)

As the end of week 4 quickly approaches, it occurs to me that I am over halfway through my 7 week timeline!  After the remainder of today’s testing, I will have had 24 participants.  While I was originally hoping to recruit 40 participants, I will be happy if I can pass 30!  Recruiting has been much more difficult than I had originally expected.  I’ve flyered the campus dorms twice, send emails to the Monroe and Research listservs, and even teamed up with two Psychology professors who agreed to offer their students extra credit if they participated in my study!  Talk about a great incentive (in addition to my own participation reward of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream)!  My advice to anyone that hopes to research on human subjects:  start recruiting immediately after receiving approval from the PHSC.  Teaming up with professors is a great way to have easy access to students, but it definitely helps to talk with them as early as possible.  Tracking down professors in the summer can be challenging:  they flit from their classroom to their lab, and are very hard to catch in their office!
So far, I have avoided any major potholes in my methodology.  However, I have had to change the test conditions a bit.  Instead of using video chat as the third communication option, the participants now use a voice chat (like Skype or Google Voice).  It turns out that not many students seem to actively use video chat, and so we were having trouble finding a way around this.  Maybe my time abroad last semester made me more reliant on the use of video chat than the average student, but I definitely thought it was a more common form of communication!  Google Voice has turned out to be a wonderful tool for this project.  Anyone with a Google Account (i.e. any William & Mary student since our WMApps is run through Google) can use this tool to call any phone in the US for free from their computer.  How awesome is that?  I feel like I am a walking advertisement for Google Voice!  With the use of this tool, participants can be put in a “Skype-like” setting without having to have a friend online at the same time.  It’s brilliant!
Looking forward, I have one more week of testing left, and then I start the long, tedious process of converting my videotapes to DVD.  Thank goodness I have the awesome Media Center to help me!  From there, I’ll run data analysis and then sit down to the daunting task of writing up my paper.  Even though I’m past the halfway point, I feel like there is still so much to accomplish!

Eine Sehr Schöne Hochzeit

This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending my friend Jenny's wedding up in Waterford. Jenny has been an integral part of my life at William & Mary - she co-lead my freshman small group, and then she and I lead an upperclass small group together this past Fall.  She is such a kind and thoughtful friend - it was truly an honor to attend her wedding!
This was also the first wedding that I've been to for a friend and not a family member.  Until now, the majority of the weddings I've attended have been for my aunts and uncles.  It's a bizarre reality watching your friends get married.  Throughout college, it feels like we're going to be here forever...that we'll stay in this social bubble.  But as I enter my senior and final year at William & Mary, I am realizing more and more that we're all on the brink of breaking out of this bubble into the "real world."  That's scary.  We'll go separate directions, and take steps to make a difference in the world around us.
As many of us commented, Jenny's wedding is the first of a season.  A season of change, a season of growing up.  I look forward to attending more friends' weddings, but I have to say I am glad that this was the first.  Jenny's wedding was simple, elegant, and radiantly beautiful - the perfect start to this exciting new chapter of her life, and what I have to look forward to.

Monroe Research Week One - Done.

This week has been incredibly busy!  As hot and humid as Williamsburg is, I absolutely love being back.  It's been really wonderful to reconnect with friends, and reconnect with the campus (though it definitely feels deserted).  I'm living in Jefferson, on the same hall as Sophomore year!  It's a bit strange being back in the same building with a different roommate and a different lifestyle - not going to class is definitely a bit bizzare.  But anyways, here is my first Monroe Blog (copied from http://upperclassmonroe.blogs.wm.edu/author/sckyle/):


It’s hard to believe that my first week of research is almost over!  These first few days have been primarily focused on background research and administration-type tasks.  My project really began to take off in late April, when my study was finally approved by the PHSC!  I had been stressed about the approval process, since I wanted to have everything taken care of before I came back to campus to start my research.  On top of it all, I was abroad last semester, and a five hour time difference definitely disrupts communication.  But in the end, it all worked out smoothly, and now I am in the midst of my research!  This week I have accomplished some major goals:  I secured a space for the actual testing of the participants in my study, and a couple of professors in the Psychology Department have been so wonderful as to let me talk about my project to their students in the hopes of recruiting them as participants!  I hope to begin testing in week 3 (around June 13), but that is very dependent on my communication with potential participants, and spreading the word as quickly as possible.

Also, I should mention that my project has changed slightly since I first posted the abstract.  Instead of describing movement/non-movement situations, the participants are going to tell their partner an exciting personal experience.  They will then repeat this story to a non-participant (because I am not observing them, they are not participants) via chat and video-chat.

In my reading (the primary task of this week), I’ve discovered that there is actually a lot of material out there on gesture and the use of nonverbal communication.  I’ve even found a couple of studies looking at the use of gesture in conversation despite the visual absence of a participant’s partner (usually the partner is hidden behind a screen) – which is extremely relevant to my research!  It’s exciting to know that my research fits into an existing topic, especially in an up-and-coming field!  Gesture studies have really taken off since about 1970, and with the addition of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) studies, this field is very new and exciting!  On entering my research, I did not know so much previous literature existed, and it is so encouraging to know that I can tie my own studies back to a well-developed field of research.