Beginning in the middle

Our thanks to Cindy for suggesting that a blog of our thinking about the lab and our research may be of interest! Martha Giles, Amy Sickel and I are currently involved in two different research projects - my hope is to use this space as a place to share our thinking about the progress and also a place to share data and ideas that develop.

Currently we are finishing up one project on locus of control and mental age across the lifespan (I will call this the LOC project). We are also just starting another one on the oldest olds' (over 85 yrs of age) relationships with their physicians (I'll refer to this one as the oldest old / Dr project).

In the LOC project we have collected about 40 interviews and assessments. All of the assessments have been entered in SPSS, I have transcribed about 30 of the interviews. Our research assistants tell me they will have about another 10 in the next week (thank you for all of your hard work!). I have looked at the demographics of the sample which is terrific! About half are white and the rest are made of different minorities, which we had hoped for! The only negative to using our current sampling method is that we tended to get people that had had at least some college, it would have been nice to get more high school grads.

With the oldest old/dr. project we received a Presidential Research Fellowship from Walden for the project. Their interest is in the lab portion of the study - in which students will participate in the lab over 3 quarters where they will assist with data collection, analysis, and writing a (hopefully) publishable paper and be coauthors. The project that the students will work on is a mixed method study of the oldest olds' relationships with their physicians. So far I have completed the paperwork for the fellowship, and we are working on the materials for the IRB. It is very complicated because of the different layers in the project - in a sense we are doing a study within a study. We have to make sure that we have covered everything (consent forms, recruitment, any measures that we will use) for both the lab portion and the oldest old portion. It looks like we may have found and gotten permission to use the assessment measures that we need yesterday. We are also trying to determine the best way to recruit students for the project. I sent off our interview questions yesterday to Marydee Spillett in the research office - she offered to take a look at them and make suggestions.

That pretty much brings us up to date - I hope to have data to share soon!