Today was a day of paperwork. I spent it mostly working on data entry of the LOC data. Also, reminding student researchers of getting their participants' paperwork to me. Not exciting in and of itself - but I always look forward to getting to play with the data once it is all in!
A lesson that I have learned that I will share with you today is the importance of being organized. You need to establish a method of saving all of the data from a study, so you can find it again later. I assign subject numbers (based on the student researcher) and use the participant's first name and the student researcher's name. That gives me a way to keep the data anonymous and yet keep track of everyone. This is a mixed method study (with 52 participants), so we have recording files, transcriptions, survey and demographic data. All of my data for a specific person is stored under both their subject number, their first name, and the researcher's name. So the name of a recording file for the student researcher Laura might be [s201 Mary Laura]. You can use whatever system you want, just be consistent.
As an aside, I have gotten a few emails from students asking questions about research procedures. Please feel free to ask questions here, I am sure other people have the same questions that you do!
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