Summary Week 7

This week students have been finishing up their last practice interview and starting on their 4 official interviews. Some data is starting to come in! Now is the time for organizing everything and putting protocols in place to make sure a faculty member reviews each interview and we do not lose any data.

I am assigning each student to a faculty member who will review all four of the student’s interviews. The faculty will provide comments and be the quality control that each interview is done correctly. I am also keeping a spreadsheet to keep track of who has submitted what and whose interviews have been approved. I have also set up a flash drive where I will save everything and back it up once a week.

I will submit the recordings to the transcription that we will be using weekly. This is complicated by the invoicing process required through the grant. I use a service that works with many people so we will have to get our work in line to be done.

We have decided to have the students enter their own data in SPSS. I set up the file this week with all of the variables labeled. Students will send me a copy of their paperwork so I can double check their data entry. It is great experience to have to enter the data and get a feel for how the file is set up. 

Next week will get complicated because all three of the faculty will be attending faculty meetings in Minneapolis. We are also doing a poster session with the data on our new sampling method (see earlier blog posts, if you want details). On Tuesday we will have our 4^th lab conference call on GoToMeeting. Wednesday we leave for MN. The lab meeting will cover a few areas of concern that have come up in reviewing the recordings, any issues on participant recruitment and the interviews, and we will discuss some plans for next quarter and doing data analysis.

Lee Stadtlander