Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 5 (June 18 - 24)

I spent most of this week working on 2 CPHS packets (consent forms, protocols, the works).

We received the submission which included children in the long-term survey back from CPHS with conditional approval. The CPHS committee made specific suggestions on what we should fix for official approval. It mostly involved proper procedures for getting the child's permission to participate (his/her signature if older than 7, parent's signature if child is younger than 7) and clarification of the payment schedule and delivery. I made their suggested changes without much trouble, and I added more modifications of our own. We realized that our previous CPHS packets we stated that interview data would be recorded by hand, and we want to have the option of audio or video recording the interviews in order to accurately transcribe the data at a later time. We would have to inform CPHS of this change and receive permission to record before we could proceed with the interviews.

Likewise, we wanted to be able to record the interviews in the pilot (which was approved), so I had to do a different submission for this.

This week we also implemented a change to our food questionnaire that the pilot participants were completing. We received the first week's worth of surveys and realized that it may be best to break down some of the questions on the questionnaire. Specifically, we wanted to break down the question "How many times did you eat out this week?" into two questions - "How many times did you eat out for LUNCH this week?" and "HOw many times did you eat out for DINNER this week?" We thought it would be easier and more accurate for users to think and count by meal than to recollect for the entire week. This change entailed asking the participants to modify their current questionnaires. The participants agreed to and now it was a matter of whether they would actually do it.

User Study Lesson 4: Test your questionnaires and all data collecting forms on colleagues or friends before sending them out. The quesstionnaire was used by Jen in an initial test, but I should have passed it by other people in another round.

This week as part of the prelim group, I read "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush...(more to come).