Sitting, waiting, wishing...
On Friday, I finally had my first participant come through for testing for my study.
Research takes its own sweet time, as I'm learning the hard way. There isn't, as I previously thought, a conveyor belt bringing volunteers to participate in our study, to do our exhausting, montonous tests. No, they have to be phoned up and asked very nicely when they can come to the research center so you can schedule an appointment. Of course it's not just you who is doing the testing, so this appointment needs to be slotted into various other people's diaries. Laboratories and rooms need to be booked and balanced so you're not pissing everyone else off by hogging the facilities.
And when you have everything set for one participant, they call and cancel.
Last week, two participants - my first two participants - canceled their appointments. It was a true headdesk moment. Besides getting demoralized, I also had to reschedule them almost immediately to a different date, which involved running around the lab's office headless trying to juggle booking experiment rooms to get a time when the participant AND the experiment rooms would be free!
Fortunately one of them had rescheduled to the end of last week, so I was really excited on Friday afternoon as I got the experiment rooms set up for his arrival, printing out the consent form and all the score sheets in the order that I would use them. He was a bit late. As I sat watching the clock, I felt what many people starting out on a new venture feel: the never-ending wait for things to fall into place, the self-doubt and the frantic search for a shred of confidence in oneself, the wish for a successful first trial before your work becomes routine and second-nature.
In the end it all went well. Because our tests are so montonous and because he's a smart man, he got used to them pretty quickly (which may or may not be a bad thing!). I think we got good data. Ready for the next few now!
Research takes its own sweet time, as I'm learning the hard way. There isn't, as I previously thought, a conveyor belt bringing volunteers to participate in our study, to do our exhausting, montonous tests. No, they have to be phoned up and asked very nicely when they can come to the research center so you can schedule an appointment. Of course it's not just you who is doing the testing, so this appointment needs to be slotted into various other people's diaries. Laboratories and rooms need to be booked and balanced so you're not pissing everyone else off by hogging the facilities.
And when you have everything set for one participant, they call and cancel.
Last week, two participants - my first two participants - canceled their appointments. It was a true headdesk moment. Besides getting demoralized, I also had to reschedule them almost immediately to a different date, which involved running around the lab's office headless trying to juggle booking experiment rooms to get a time when the participant AND the experiment rooms would be free!
Fortunately one of them had rescheduled to the end of last week, so I was really excited on Friday afternoon as I got the experiment rooms set up for his arrival, printing out the consent form and all the score sheets in the order that I would use them. He was a bit late. As I sat watching the clock, I felt what many people starting out on a new venture feel: the never-ending wait for things to fall into place, the self-doubt and the frantic search for a shred of confidence in oneself, the wish for a successful first trial before your work becomes routine and second-nature.
In the end it all went well. Because our tests are so montonous and because he's a smart man, he got used to them pretty quickly (which may or may not be a bad thing!). I think we got good data. Ready for the next few now!