At last our group has been approved for for collecting data! Getting the IRB approval was quite a process. The most frustrating thing about today was that after we did all of that work and got approval, we then found out that we would not be able to use SurveyMonkey without paying $30. It would have been nice if it had notified us when we made all of the questions that creating more than 10 questions is a premium feature.

Major things that we had to change was adding a consent form, which was pretty easy since I just used the template that was given to us. making sure that we are not trying to prove that cadets are commissioning because they have conservative values. When collecting data we are using the rat class as a control variable. Because they are all non-commissioned and either seeking or not seeking we can see that commissioning does not make cadets more conservative. Also we adjusted our data collecting methods to a scale instead of labeling students as Conservative or Liberal basically.

I am very frustrated with a couple of my group members for not pulling their weight in this project. And we will see how the data collection goes!

So, I am a little late for this post, but better late than never right?

Upon first hearing about getting the IRB approval in order to start collecting data for our project, I thought wow this is going to be a very long and difficult process. Especially since Professor Sanborn said in class that he has to go through this same process in order to get his research approved, I couldn’t help but think oh jeez this  is going to be a horrible process. But once I actually looked at the IRB application form I couldn’t help but think, it cant be this easy. Surprisingly, filling out the form was not that bad.

We received comments after turning in our first draft and there was a few slight changes that needed to be made along wit actually making our survey that needed to be handed out, but otherwise we didn’t do too bad!

One thing I am second guessing is our research design. I am really questioning how many people are going to participate in the survey. Also, is there going to be a good distribution across the different classes. Ideally we would need 30 cadets in each class to respond, which is 120 participants, which seems like a lot. I guess we will have to see.

My suggestion for Pollock I though about this wee is to try and get the diagrams and words to align on the same page a little bit  better. There are times the diagrams are like a whole page or two behind. This week SPSS Statistics went very smoothly I have no complaints. I flew through the reading and the questions on correlation and linear regression, no problem. It is weird to think that we are done with Pollock and pretty much covered his whole book so quickly. I honestly would not mind having worked on SPSS statistics all semester long and not doing a group project, but I guess now comes the time for us to apply what we have learned so far this semester. I like our topic for our group project, but I can’t say I am excited about having the project. Just with IS capstone, a long research paper for Spanish, and the writing assignments I have coming up for US history, I am just feeling a little weighted down.

As far as Thyne, it felt pointless doing the reading because I retained very little of it. He includes a lot  of complex information in a very small space, with in my opinion poor explanation. I did not understand from his diagrams, or for the reading how it is he calculated the discordant and concordant pairs. Also, considering what we were doing on SPSS statistics I get that Thyne is like the background information on what is being calculated for us on SPSS statistics, but it seems like extra for our purposes of the class. Like I don’t remember any of the formulas like tau-c, because I never actually needed it to calculate anything, so it was irrelevant and just extra information.