Neuroscientists have demonstrated that if you ask yourself, “What am I grateful for?”, it will raise dopamine and serotonin in the brain, both of which help boost your mood when you feel down. You don’t even have to find something that you are grateful for…
It seems inevitable – when many of us are wearing devices like smart watches and step counters that can also monitor our heart rate and even track movement while we sleep, when will that technology cross over into survey research? It seems…
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…
Let’s see how simple we can make this…beware, I may go too far. If you really want to know about this topic, click the “Human Subjects Protections Update” button to the right, and you will have plenty to read…
Most agree that people have numerous motivations to participate in research. In a recent article, Florian Keusch thoroughly details the various reasons why people participate in web surveys. It is clear that there is no single reason — societal characteristics, individual characteristics, and survey characteristics all play a role. But like most strong literature reviews do, it left me with this…
Bear with me — but I have an idea. I may have stumbled upon the solution to a troubling trend in our science. Response rates are dropping. We used to say that it was critical to get high response rates in our studies. We spoke of our fight against our nemesis of “Non-Response Error”!
But then as it became clear that we were losing that fight…
Why do we NOT routinely capture data about respondents’ local current temperatures and cloud cover, recent or upcoming extreme weather, regional pollen counts, and other related data while we collect survey data?
Rarely a day passes without me saying (or hearing someone else say), “I wonder how this may impact data quality,” or, “I wonder why we keep doing it this way,” or my favorite, “I wonder if anyone else has wondered this too!“
I have seen the power of the scientific method. I have seen that ideas can grow and expand, and how they usually twist and turn. I know that science is not linear.
So it is time for me to spin off my little wonderments to the world…
When Apple’s ResearchKit was announced, almost immediately some squawked about the ethical problems that may be raised by its use. One argument suggested that because teens use iPhones, and because teens “aren’t supposed to take part in medical studies without parental consent” this would be bad. The argument proceeds…