This week we are supposed to write about one thing we feel really good about, one thing we feel neutral about, and one thing we fell anxious/scared about relating to our research.
When I think about my experiment with blackjack, I feel like this
I feel like I have thought through it well and that I have at least figured out how to put my participants in the same setting and isolate my variables. I plan to have each participant be faced with an ambiguous decision on whether to hit or stay (so he/she will probably have a hand of 14 or 15), so I can measure how many times they hit and stay when I change my variable. Since the only thing I am changing is the effect I'm using to influence them, I can attribute any change in hit/stay rate to the variable (as long as I account for risk-averseness, but I will talk about that later in the post).
When I think about putting my subtopics in conversation, I fee1 like this
The problem I'm facing is that the main gap in my research is that my subtopics (the effects I'm looking at) are not really looked at together or in conversation. I think I know how to put them in conversation; I plan to discuss how they show similar behaviors and how they might relate to each other. But I am still a little unsure about it. I'm not feeling bad or good about this part of my research. I'm sure I can get it done, but I'm definitely not jumping out of my seat eagerly to do it.
When I think about refining my scope and trying to standardize risk-averseness I feel like this
The problem I am facing is that in order to get any meaningful results, I need to make sure my participants are close to equally risky people, meaning that they are all equally prone to taking or not taking risk. This is important because if I do not account for it, I could have one group that is very risky and another that is very risk-averse (not risky), which would screw up my data. I might think that the effect I was testing with the risky group was more influential even if it was not. In order to account for this, I have been looking into researched risk-assessment tests. Some work, so I might give the test to each of my participants and measure it that way. But my other problem is that I need to find an age group of people who have the same level of risk (and that level of risk is medium). For the most effective risk mitigation, I would ideally use adults between the ages of 30 and 40 because they are not that risky and not too conservative yet as well (according to a study I'm looking into that is true). But my problem is that I do not know 60 people (that is about how many I will need) in that age group who will participate in the study. So I am trying to find the balance between a feasible scope for my experiment and as much risk mitigation as possible. So that is what I currently do not feel great about but hopefully I will figure it out soon and change to this Kanye. (563)
