Between quarter thoughts

This week we are officially on break and students have been using the time to get caught up on their interviews. This past week I sent out the end of quarter Research Knowledge and Research Outcomes surveys to both the lab and control group students. I will report to you on this when all surveys are in. This brings up a point that I would like to address today – the problem of participants not actually reading survey instruments. Often as a researcher you may strongly suspect that a person has not actually read the survey – all answers given are the same throughout the survey. This is particularly the case when there are several questions that are reversed scored (where the expected answer should be the opposite of other answers), it really raises questions on the validity of your results. I sent emails to several students asking them to double check their answers because of just this issue. There are still a couple of surveys I really wonder about, but there is little more that can be done from the researcher perspective.

What are the responsibilities of a participant? We assume that people are reading the information that we give them. We also assume that they are being honest in their responses. But truly there is no way to know if either of these assumptions is correct. This is one of the limitations of survey work, and it is important to always keep this in back of your mind as a researcher.

Next week we start the second quarter of the project. We are asking each student to become an expert in one of our variables, they will read articles each week on the variable and how it relates to the oldest old and report back to the rest of the lab. By the 3^rd week of the quarter we should start analyzing the quantitative data in SPSS. Each student will concentrate on their expertise area until we are ready to start correlating various variables together.

Lee Stadtlander