Update to Researching

The first week of my official "researching" phase has come to an end. Now that school is almost over, I hope to dedicate more time to my research and have more time to spare. I never realized how much time an entire school day plus homework can consume of my day. I am happy to finally commit myself to my research, so I can finish early. There have been a few advancements in concerns to my project: the number of participants I have collected, my statistical analysis, and the improvement of my literature review and methods.

I have collected two more participants, which means now I have 6 total. So far, I have collected 2 adults and 4 children. It has definitely gotten easier with practice to explain my project and assure people that their information will be confidential and useful to the sphere of psychology as a whole. I feel more confident in asking people and am sure I can obtain more in the upcoming weeks, especially when I am coming in full time and more regularly.

In terms of my statistical analysis, I was able to greatly clarify how I can organize my data. I plan to create a table with the scores for the first reading and the last, with documents dedicated to the patients. With a table constructed, I can simply just put in the values and calculate the means when I get home. I can copy and paste the same table to multiple patients, like forms to fill in. I hope this system can make it easier to collect the data I need more efficiently and quickly.

Finally, with the help of Mrs. Haag, I think I have improved my literature review and methods immensely. Not only were the vital but easy to forget details like grammar and citations corrected, but the organization of my literature review was modified to ensure that little paragraphs wouldn't be my downfall. I was able to consolidate statistics about adult ADHD with the evolution of childhood ADHD into adult ADHD. This way, readers can have the context of the number of individuals with adult ADHD before the explanation of why it arises is presented. I was also able to use the disadvantage of neurofeedback therapy of its lack of research to transition into the gap in the research that I will fill. The transitions were made much stronger, quotes were not used to end or begin paragraphs, and technical terms were made clear. Overall, I think it is in much better shape. I had not realized a lot of the mistakes it had, but having other people read it greatly helped in changing my perspective and understanding that not everyone understood the same terms that I spent weeks researching and familiarizing myself with.

In the upcoming weeks, I look forward to proofreading my literature review and methods and submitting the two assignments, gathering more patient consent, recording more data, and beginning to start the analysis of the scores I collect.

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The Beginning of The Research Process

It’s finally the time to start actually implementing our methods and seeing what our research yields, arguably the most exciting part of this class. I have just started conducting my methods last Thursday with asking incoming patients for permission for me to look through their records for my research project. So far, I have obtained consent forms from three children (parental consent) and one adult.  I have opened up the first file to analyze.

I am surprised at how quickly I have been receiving permission from patients to look through their records. This was the part I anticipated taking the longest and, at least with the very first day, it has been going right on track or faster than I thought it would. It has been a relief actually that the time I put into the clinic and getting to know these patients is paying off, as they trust me and want to support me during this process. And it has been a uniquely positive experience.

What has been not so great was the analyzing of the records. I figured it wouldn’t take that long to go through a patient’s records and note down the differences in their results between session intervals, but I have been finding it challenging to go through these records that are pretty dense with information to find the exact test I am looking for. I have been finding it helpful to superficially note down the trends of improvement I may see from shuffling back through the stacks of paper to find their first test. Especially, working at the clinic itself and trying to help out at the same time has been complicated. I think when school finally does get out and I have more time to dedicate to my research, these issues will clear up a bit and I can juggle between working and researching.

Recording the results on the computer in a digestible way has also been difficult because the results of the diagnostic tests are presented differently throughout the file, so I need to establish a standard table or way of organizing all this data I have to record. Additionally, organizing all the consent forms (parental consent, patient assent for children, patient consent for adults) has been harder than I thought.  Basically organizing all this information that I am receiving and seeking out has been challenging. I need to devise a system to keep everything on track.

So far, I am pretty on schedule in terms of my plans. I did leave a lot of wiggle room for getting patient consent, but that now needs to be reallocated for analyzing patient records instead. If analyzing results does deviate my schedule, I did account for mishaps to possibly occur, allowing extra time especially for the researching component.  Once I have the information from the clinic, working from home on the paper shall alleviate a lot of the stress and time constraint I have at the clinic.

Overall, I think I am on a pretty good schedule. If things do run behind, I can try to pull time from some parts of the process I may have been too generous in giving time to work on (composing the paper) and instead focusing more on problem areas that have been taking more time than anticipated (results, statistical analysis).

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Methods Improvement

I am glad we were able to have these last few classes to receive feedback on our methods because I realized when you have another few sets of eyes reading your work, all the mistakes you hadn’t realized you made are suddenly made obvious.

My group helped me discern the biggest problems, generally, of my methods section: the abundance of assumptions, the numerous unexplained technical terms, and the lack of specifics and timeline. While my methods had its merits with clear organization in regards to subtopics and titles, it lacked the transitions that are supposed to come with that. I need help with how to phrase transitions organically. I am one of those people that feel like a title is enough of a transition, but that is not true. If anyone has any suggestions how I can transition say from participants to testing variables or topics like that would be really helpful.

After going through the overview of what needed to be done (including improving my methods overview subtopic), we got into the specifics. I never really justify my sample size, why is 24 a number that is relevant or meaningful? I should have included how this number was not only feasible with the limited number of patients that do come to the clinic, but viable because past research has used a similar number of samples to obtain significant results. I need more help with this justification though, so any ideas would be appreciated.

Another specific drawback of my method was its lack of a timeline with instead too much wasted text on information I already shared in the literature review and that could be easily summarized. I never really go over how long each step of the procedure would take and justify the number of sessions that I will be looking at for results. I also needed a more definite sentence to tie back to the question itself instead of being vague about the purpose, just to be as clear as possible.

Some smaller issues were some colloquial phrasing, some paragraphs needing to be split to be more digestible, and at times the writing being too wordy.

The definite weakest section, and the part that I realized as I talked about it I wasn’t entirely sure what I was trying to achieve was my plan for the analysis of my results. As I attempted to explain my logic behind using the Hedges G’ formula, I realize that this needed more to reflect a significant result. So, over the weekend I worked with my uncle through Skype, as he has a degree in statistics and uses it ever day at his own practice to see the efficacy of the medication and procedures he provides. We worked out that I needed to get more specific and expand on what was going to happen. There are 18 questions to the Conners Test and each question has 4 possible answers. As I note down the positive answers to each question, I should be able to determine if it a normal distribution with most answers being “moderate” and less being “never” or “always”. Assuming it is, then I can conduct a paired T-test between the first reading and the last reading for the adult and children groups based on the number of positive responses to these tests and then work out if its is statistically significant allowing for the standard 5% error. I will go into more depth in my actual methods, but this is the gist of it. I realized that there was so much that was missing from my statistical method and that was definitely the weakest part of my methods sections.

So overall, I still have some things to work on but I am happy that I feel like these are parts of the method that are possible to improve with a little time.



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