Survey Refinement and Pre-Registration

My Week In Three Words: Discussion, Seminars, and Fine-Tuning

What I’ve been working on: This week I’ve been working on refining our survey and researching whether we want to pre-register the survey our not. I’ve been revisiting some papers I reviewed earlier and bringing in specific topics of discussion as to if we want to keep our current survey topics or add/remove others to our weekly team meeting. With my mentor’s suggestion, I read a paper on HARKing, which is Hypothesizing After Results are Known. The paper is called HARK No More: On the Preregistration of CHI Experiments. It’s a funny acronym, but when I looked into the issues around this idea, they were no joke! I’d honestly encourage anyone newer to publishing in research to check this paper out because–at least for me–it did a great job of outlining biases and arguments for and against evaluation and publishing methods in research. It also does a very non-technical high level overview of statistical analysis in research which was helpful for me. Our group decided that we wanted to pre-register with one of the sites listed in that paper: Open Science Framework. I also went to the seminar at UW (they’re called DUB Seminars). This week two researchers presented on the designer and instituational spaces of discourse as a response to the pandemic. I helped set up a weekly check-in and got to meet up with some amazing REU folks in my lab. Finally, I got access to a dataset from Dr. Deepak Kumar from their paper on Designing Toxic Content Classification for a Diversity of Perspectives that we’ll be using with our study. Finally, I sent out networking requests to meet with a few professors and PhD students in UW.

What I’ve learned:

1. Daily check-ins are a great way to connect with other interns and hear about work outside your lab/project group
2. If you’re like me and tend to get in our head a lot when working alone, going to events like Seminars is a great way to meet other folks and take a break from your work
3. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I was afraid of reaching out to network with others in UW because I thought I’d be wasting their time. Here’s what I would tell myself from a week ago: it’s okay to be afraid, but you should still do it. By the way–they all responded and I’m getting to meet them next week!

What I’m curious about:

1. How do you measure “productivity” in research?
2. How do you draw the line between work/life balance?