New Year, New Me, New Post: Reflecting on My Methods

Hello All:

After a restful and Netflix-filled winter break, I am back to school and to blogging. Only a few more weeks and then us Seniors will be off on our own during the third trimester. As the saying goes, New Year, New Me(mes), so here's a preview of what 2017 has in store for you all.

In the spirit of New Years, this week's assignment is to reflect on our methods and identify ways to improve them. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to have my paper read over and critiqued by my peers, so that should make this assignment a little easier and hopefully even more productive.

For anyone who does not know what my methods are, I will provide a quick summary. I am investigating how the effect of time pressure, near-misses, and priming influence blackjack behavior. So I designed an experiment that will have four groups play blackjack while under the influence of the different effects. Their behaviors will be observed and measured to help me find results. Hopefully that brief summary gives you a better understanding of my methods.

Overall, I feel that the design of my methods was fairly strong. However I often did a poor job explaining myself and got excessively wordy, especially through the use of passive voice. The key weaknesses that need to be addressed in my methods section are passive voice, lack of smooth and rigorous justifications, fixing unclear explanations, and unnecessary transitions.

Throughout my paper, passive voice obscures the meaning of my sentences. Often times, the sentences became overly wordy and emphasized the wrong aspects. I often used passive structures in my justifications, which made them extremely long-winded and hard to follow. If I can fix the passive voice issues throughout my paper, my methods section will become clearer and easier to follow.

Along with passive voice problems, many of my justifications were unclear. This was often due to the roundabout way that I wrote them very roundaboutly. The previous sentence was a perfect example of  the overt repetition I used when I could have just said it briefly and directly. Throughout my methods, I often found that I could explain it well orally but I did not translate my own understanding into the paper.

Similarly, I found that my explanations of my actual methods were often times unclear as well. When I tried to explain the risk survey that I would be using, I ended up confusing many of my group members. This is because I did not provide the full context around the survey. I think it was also difficult to explain my methods chronologically because I have not done them yet.

Building off of that, I had awkward transitions between the different sections of my paper and tried to justify the order that I was doing the groups in, even though since they are all separate it is unnecessary. I used wordy and often-times clunky phrases to try and transition between my subtopics when concise methods would have sufficed. Hopefully after my edits, my methods will be as strong as this guy. (516)

Timeline

Hello All:

We just turned in our proposals, so now it is time to move on to creating a plan of action for my research. Since I am performing an experiment, I will not be able to actually get started on my data collection until February. But that does not mean that January will be a month of sitting around and doing nothing for me; I will have to prepare all the logistics of my experiment as well as learn how to analyze my data, so I can quickly write up the results section after I collect my data in February.

In terms of a timeline for the actual experiment, I am currently in the process of coordinating the use of rooms at BASIS Scottsdale for my experiment with Ms. Jordison. She has already given me a tentative agreement for use of rooms, but now we just need to finalize all of the details. Throughout January, I will also be making sure that I have enough participants. I am going to recruit BASIS Scottsdale parents to participate. Depending on how many I initially get, I might need to recruit more adults. I will go about doing this by asking people who I or my parents know from various sources, then I will ask people to reach out to people they know. Hopefully, I can get enough BASIS Scottsdale parents to participate in my experiment, but I will need about 50-60 participants, so if I do not get that many participants, I will still have January to gather more participants for my experiment.

Besides preparing the experiment, I will also need to learn how to analyze the results. I will need to research how to understand data better by cross referencing surveys. I am going to have people of different ages, genders, and incomes, so I need to learn how to analyze data from people of different demographics and compare them. I will also need to learn about how to write up experimental data and analyze it.

By late February, I should be done with the experiment and data collection, so then I will start to write up my results. My results and conclusions sections should take me to the end of March. I will need to implement what I learned in January and cross reference my data with the survey results in order to compare the relative influence of the effects. (401)

Elevator Pitch Video

Hello All:

Here is my video. I hope you enjoy it and want to invest in my research.

Initial Feelings on My Methods

Hello All:

Over the course of the past week or so, I have completed my methods assignment and gotten a much clearer vision for the direction of my research and methods. To remind anyone who is not familiar with my research, I am looking into the comparative influence of time pressure, near-misses, and priming on blackjack betting behavior.

My research presents a few challenges that I have to solve with my methods. First, I need to find participants for my study. The participants must be adults and there must be a lot of them, so I can split them into four groups (one for each effect and one for the control) and still have enough members of each group to yield meaningful results. I am a little nervous about that, but I am sure that if I start contacting potential subjects soon I can find people willing to participate.

Once I have the subjects, I need to make sure that their predispositions and biases do not affect my results and make them invalid, so I will have to survey them to understand their predispositions in regard to gambling history and riskiness. I have found a survey that has been researched thoroughly and shown to work, so I am thinking of sending it out to my subjects electronically and having them answer it before they come in to participate. Then, I can split them into groups that are representative of the population I am testing. Thus yielding more meaningful and valid results.

Once I get the subjects into my experiment, I need to find a way to standardize a measurement in order to judge the influences of each effect comparatively. I plan to do this by putting my subjects in the same situation; I will present them with an ambiguous hand of 15, which is shown to have no common betting practices and then measure how many times subjects hit or stay under each condition. I will also observe my subjects in order to gain a full perspective on the data. This standardized measure will allow me to compare the effects concretely. I will set up the situation by stacking the cards when the player is out of the room.

For each of the effects I need to vary the procedure slightly differently. I plan to have the dealer give the player a verbal three-second time limit for betting during the time pressure situation. To test the near-miss effect, I plan to set the cards up so the player should have one or two near misses prior to facing the ambiguous hand. I plan to prime the participant by showing them the number 6, which is needed to get 21, through pictures and quiet music and sounds throughout the experiment. I am a little nervous about the priming because I have to find the perfect balance of being discreet and being noticeable enough for the priming to work.

Overall my general experimental set up has me feeling pretty good. Like this confident baby.

But some of the logistical planning it is going to take has me feeling more like this baby.

I am a little nervous about trying to keep my subjects separate to avoid potential confounding variables of social interaction while gambling, which is a whole other study that needs to be done. I am also nervous about scheduling the experiments at times that work for me, my subjects, any volunteers I may need to help me, and the place that I will be doing the experiment in (ideally BASIS). Hopefully, I will get all the logistics figured out soon and it will all run smoothly. Then, I will be like this baby. (613)

Reflecting on the First Trimester

Hello All:

I'm back from my long hiatus. It has been a crazy year so far and my research has come along way. When I initially cam into AP research, I was pretty set on studying behavioral economics, specifically price anchoring. As I read more into price anchoring, I was still very fascinated with it, but I also found that research on the topic was saturated and there was not a lot for me to contribute to the field. Also, as I read into behavioral economics journals, I became more interested in time pressure, social factors, and subconscious factors that influence behavior.

Through all of my reading, I eventually came to the topic of gambling and behavioral influences of gambling. Although it is a lot different from my initial idea, I feel like I found an area that I can contribute to and am extremely interested in. After that, I had to start the lit review process and it left me looking a little like this.

At the start of the lit review, I was very lost on how to structure my argument. But as I read more, I began to realize that I had to explain all of the effects and relate them together. But that was not an easy task. The biggest problem I had with my lit review was my trouble putting my subtopics in conversation and justifying that the effects I chose were the most important to look at.

But through conversation with Mrs. Haag and my peer-review group, Kimy and Brian, I figured it all out. I had to create a new framework and add in more psychological elements in order to justify the effects that I used. 

Now that the lit review is done, I am excited to move on to the methods. I am currently thinking of using an observational study to understand the effects. I will need four groups: a control group and a group for each effect. I am a little nervous about trying to get a wide sample and a lot of people to participate in my study because without a wide variety of people, my results will not be meaningful. Hopefully, I can start reaching out to potential participants soon. As I read my literature, I will get a better sense of the specifics of my methods and create an experiment that will yield meaningful results.

Here is a meme to for reading the whole post. (417)