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.



(643)