From the LaunchPad

Welcome to The Launchpad, SoundRocket’s blog, where we share our insights and musings on the science of doing science (well), #soundscience.

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Assessing event-based college student drinking and social context using mobile devices

Assessing event-based college student drinking and social context using mobile devices

Most surveys of alcohol-use ask about behaviors and patterns that happen days, weeks months or even years ago. It’s all retrospective recollection from study participants. It’s useful for identifying general trends but it’s fraught with measurement errors.  And when the topic of the study is binge drinking, errors involving memory can increase. — even if you’re asking the question the next day.

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Examining the Feasibility of Using SMS When Surveying College Students

Examining the Feasibility of Using SMS When Surveying College Students

ext messages (also known as Short Message Service, or SMS) are more and more becoming the go-to medium of communication. This especially is the case for today’s college students, who seem to conduct their social and even business lives completely via their smartphone.

Scott Crawford and the team at SoundRocket looked at the data surrounding the efficacy of using SMS when surveying college students, resulting in a presentation at the 2013 American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Conference.

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Peer Review as a Necessary but Unscientific Process – Can we just do some iterative science already?

Peer review is wonderful in theory.  Scientists reviewing other scientists’ work to evaluate whether the science was applied thoroughly, implemented well, and interpreted effectively can be a wonderful way to allow the best science through.  But the Reproducibility Project clearly demonstrated that something is broken – when over a quarter of the published studies reviewed could not be replicated. 

It is not a surprise to most.  Humans are involved.  We make mistakes…

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