Setback Sixth Week
This week, we had some great progress as well as a major setback.
For the passwords project, we want subjects to create a login account, take a survey, and login again. I created the survey using some of the questions from the 2014 Political Polarization and Typology Survey from the PEW Research Center. I also used demographic questions and research questions created by members of our lab.
Last week, I mentioned that we had worked together to determine how the security certificate data should be coded. However, this was not a good research practice. In fact, all of our work had to be thrown out. In the qualitative coding process, only the list of possible second-order codes should be created by the group. There should be no discussion regarding how individual data should be classified. However, we discussed how the individual data should be classified as a group because that was what we did at training. We were all under the impression that this was how this research method was done. In research, everyone should do the individual data sorting separately and part of the statistics is seeing how much the sorters agree on categorization of data.
As a result, we had to meet as a group to discuss a new listing of second order codes that reflected what we had discovered. This meeting was held under the guidance of Dr. Camp and Dr. Diane Henshel. This meeting was incredibly helpful in discovering how professional researchers handle this type of a discussion.
Next week, we will recategorize the data separately and upload it to GitHub, where I will put it in a single document for one of the graduate students to statistically analyze.
For the passwords project, we want subjects to create a login account, take a survey, and login again. I created the survey using some of the questions from the 2014 Political Polarization and Typology Survey from the PEW Research Center. I also used demographic questions and research questions created by members of our lab.
Last week, I mentioned that we had worked together to determine how the security certificate data should be coded. However, this was not a good research practice. In fact, all of our work had to be thrown out. In the qualitative coding process, only the list of possible second-order codes should be created by the group. There should be no discussion regarding how individual data should be classified. However, we discussed how the individual data should be classified as a group because that was what we did at training. We were all under the impression that this was how this research method was done. In research, everyone should do the individual data sorting separately and part of the statistics is seeing how much the sorters agree on categorization of data.
As a result, we had to meet as a group to discuss a new listing of second order codes that reflected what we had discovered. This meeting was held under the guidance of Dr. Camp and Dr. Diane Henshel. This meeting was incredibly helpful in discovering how professional researchers handle this type of a discussion.
Next week, we will recategorize the data separately and upload it to GitHub, where I will put it in a single document for one of the graduate students to statistically analyze.
This was the week of the Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW). Elinor and Vincent Ostrom looked at using collective action, trust, and cooperation to manage common pool resources. This conference discussed their ideas.
The entire lab joined Dr. Camp at a workshop that she led entitled "Common Pool and Crowdsourcing in Health Informatics." During this workshop, different researchers presented the projects they were designing for critique from other researchers in the room. We heard a quick summary of each project and broke up into small groups headed by the researchers to discuss their ideas in a smaller setting. There were many interesting ideas, including an phone application, which keeps track of steps in order to promote healthy living for women in lower socio-economic statuses, and a program to introduce the ultra-cute PARO seal robots into elderly homes.
I also attended several of the social events, including a reception and an art exhibit entitled "Ojibwe Public Art, Ostrom Private Lives." The Ostroms had an interest in collecting Native American Indian art and heavily supported the artists.
In the Wednesday seminar, we talked about plagiarism. We addressed what it is and how to tell the difference between rephrasing and plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious concern for academia. The University of Alabama has an Academic Honor Code that makes it clear what is not allowed. Every year, there is an Academic Integrity Week that has speakers, workshops, and promotional items to raise awareness of the Academic Honor Code.
We had our lunch reading group this week. Mariana Cains led a discussion on two papers ("Applying Weight-of-Evidence in Retrospective Ecological Risk Assessment When Quantitative Data Are Limited" and "Weight-of-Evidence (WOE): Quantitative Estimation of Probability of Impairment for Individual and Multiple Lines of Evidence") that looked at weight of evidence analysis. We discussed the pros and cons to the different weight of evidence calculation methods. It was interesting to talk about how "valuable" evidence is in research. This discussion helped me better understand how research, in general, works.
The entire lab joined Dr. Camp at a workshop that she led entitled "Common Pool and Crowdsourcing in Health Informatics." During this workshop, different researchers presented the projects they were designing for critique from other researchers in the room. We heard a quick summary of each project and broke up into small groups headed by the researchers to discuss their ideas in a smaller setting. There were many interesting ideas, including an phone application, which keeps track of steps in order to promote healthy living for women in lower socio-economic statuses, and a program to introduce the ultra-cute PARO seal robots into elderly homes.
I also attended several of the social events, including a reception and an art exhibit entitled "Ojibwe Public Art, Ostrom Private Lives." The Ostroms had an interest in collecting Native American Indian art and heavily supported the artists.
In the Wednesday seminar, we talked about plagiarism. We addressed what it is and how to tell the difference between rephrasing and plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious concern for academia. The University of Alabama has an Academic Honor Code that makes it clear what is not allowed. Every year, there is an Academic Integrity Week that has speakers, workshops, and promotional items to raise awareness of the Academic Honor Code.
We had our lunch reading group this week. Mariana Cains led a discussion on two papers ("Applying Weight-of-Evidence in Retrospective Ecological Risk Assessment When Quantitative Data Are Limited" and "Weight-of-Evidence (WOE): Quantitative Estimation of Probability of Impairment for Individual and Multiple Lines of Evidence") that looked at weight of evidence analysis. We discussed the pros and cons to the different weight of evidence calculation methods. It was interesting to talk about how "valuable" evidence is in research. This discussion helped me better understand how research, in general, works.