I found the SPSS homework assignments to be useful in that they introduced me to the basics of the computer techniques of statistical analysis. For the most part, I found them to be fairly easy, although sometimes they felt a bit repetitive. They were grade-boosters as well, but I am glad to be done with them and moving on writing an actual research paper.
Of course, my group already submitted drafts of our literature review and our section on our theory, hypothesis, and conceptual definitions earlier in the semester. I feel good about our work on them, although we need to add several more sources to our literature review and do a little more work on the causal mechanisms in the theory.
Right now, our immediate concern is collecting our data. I took COL Foster’s IS-460: Research Design for Political Science class last semester, so I am familiar with the main parts of a political science paper. However, in COL Foster’s class, all of us relied on existing datasets already available online. This is the first time that I will be collecting data myself.
In my past several years as a cadet at VMI, I have received numerous requests from other students, most of them via email, asking me to participate in a survey for their research paper. I had noticed that on all of those surveys, the first page was always an “Informed Consent” form.
As I am now filling out the IRB application for this class, I realize now the importance of these forms. I understand the seriousness of violating the privacy of subjects who participate in our study. I have learned techniques on how to maintain the privacy of the subjects, such as by not attaching their names to the surveys themselves at any point, and by destroying the surveys after we have gleaned the data from them and have the data stored securely on a spreadsheet in a database.
In the IRB application, our group had to decide what questions we wanted to ask our subjects, as well as how we were going to select participants in the study. The two most obvious questions that we absolutely needed to ask corresponded to our independent and dependent variables: “How much time do you spend playing video games?” and “What is your GPA?”. However, there were problems with simply asking these two questions directly. With regard to the question “How much time do you spend playing video games?”, people may not really know or may intentionally misreport how much time they invest into playing video games. Popular social thought often associates playing video games with laziness, unproductivity, and a lack of ambition. People may not want to admit to a researcher or themselves how many hours they truly spend gaming, or they simply may not keep track of the hours in the head very accurately. To combat these problems, our survey broke the main question down into parts by first asking the subjects how many days per week they played video games, and then asking how many hours per day they played. We hoped that this approach would guide subjects to provide more accurate estimates. With the regard to the question, “What is your GPA?”, similar problems seemed present. People with lower GPAs may be less willing to report to a researcher their actual GPA, or they may unintentionally misreport the information. To combat this problem, we provided a several ranges of GPAs. The subjects simply had to select the range into which their GPA fell, instead of writing down their actual GPA out to several decimal places.
After that, we submitted our IRB application, with survey attached, for review. We had to iron out a couple things: First, we had originally framed the question about video game usage as “Do you own and have access to a video gaming platform?” However, COL Sanborn pointed out that this did not really reflect the point of our research paper, which was to discover if actually playing more video games led to a decrease in GPA. So, we adjusted our original question to the questions noted in the paragraph above. Second, our survey had no control variables. So, we added several control variables such as whether the subject held rank or was an NCAA athlete. Third, we had to decide what to do if the first person on the door card was not in the room. (We decided to simply proceed to the next room.)
We agreed 60 subjects was a sufficient number for our survey. We surveyed 15 subjects each. Our method was to go to every fourth room in barracks and survey the person whose name came first on the door card. There was some trouble with this method since people where not always there or chose not to respond to the survey. (Most cadets are very tired of taking surveys at this point in the semester.) So, I had to adjust my survey method to going to every other room in barracks, and soon I had collected all the data I needed.
Once we had our data, the coding process was straightforward. I had never coded variables myself before. It was actually an interesting experience, as I changed people’s answers to basic questions into “1’s” and “0’s” on a spreadsheet in SPSS. COL Sanborn showed me how to change the names of each column of data in the SPSS spreadsheet to reflect the questions that each column corresponded to.
At this point, all we need to do is decide what type of statistical analysis to use and then run it on SPSS—and then write the 5,000-word paper.