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!