Tag Archives: research

What’s your recruitment style?

Posted on by | Leave a reply

Last week, Dr. Rowe and I visited Portland Art Museum to help assist with a recruitment push for participants in their Conversations About Art evaluation and I noticed all of the education staff involved have very different styles of how they recruited visitors to participate in the project. Styles ranged from the apologetic (e.g. “do you mind if I interrupt you to help us”), to incentive-focused (e.g. “get free tickets!) to experiential (e.g. “participating will be fun and informative!”)

This got me thinking a lot about  the significance of people skills and a researcher’s recruitment style in educational studies this week. How does the style in which you get participants involved influence a) how many participants you actually recruit, and b) the quality of the participation (i.e. do they just go through the motions to get the freebie incentive?) Thinking back to prior studies of FCL alum here from OSU, I realized that nearly all the researchers I knew had a different approach to recruitment, be it in person, on the phone or via email, and that in fact it is a learned skill that we don’t often talk too much about.

I’ve been grateful for my success at recruiting both docents and visitors for my research on docent-visitor interactions, which is mostly the result of taking the “help a graduate student complete their research” approach – one that I borrowed from interacting with prior Marine Resource Management colleagues of mine, Abby Nickels and Alicia Christensen during their masters research on marine education activities. Such an approach won’t be much help in the future once I finally get out of grad school, so the question to consider is what factors make for successful participant recruitment? It seems the common denominator is people skills, and by people skills I mean the ability to engage a potential recruit on a level that removes skepticism around being commandeered off the street.  You have to be not only trustworthy, but also approachable. I’ve definitely noticed with my own work that on off days where I’m tired and have trouble maintaining a smiley face for long periods of time at the HMSC entrance, recruitment seems harder. All those younger years spent in customer service jobs and learning how to deal with the public in general seem so much more worthwhile!

So fellow researchers and evaluators, my question for you is what are your strategies for recruiting participants? Do you agree people skills are an important underlying factor? Do you over/under estimate your own personal influence on participant recruitment?

 

 

 

The Juggling Act of the IRB process

Posted on by | Leave a reply

I want to talk today about what many of us here have alluded to in other posts: the approval (and beyond) process of conducting ethical human research. What grew out of really really unethical primarily medical research on humans many years ago now has evolved into something that can take up a great deal of your research time, especially on a large, long-duration grant such as ours. Many people (including me, until recently) thought of this process as primarily something to be done up-front: get approval, then sort of forgotten about except for the actual gaining of consent as you go and unless you significantly change your research questions or process. Wrong! It’s a much more constant, living thing.

We at the Visitor Center have several things that make us a weird case for our Institutional Review Board office at the university. First, even though it is generally educational research that we do, as part of the Science and Mathematics Education program, our research sites (the Visitor Center and other community-based locations) are not typically “approved educational research settings” such as classrooms. Classrooms have been so frequently used over the years that they have a more streamlined approval process unless you’re introducing a radically different type of experiment. Second, we’re a place where we have several types of visitor populations: the general public, OSU student groups, and K-12 school and camp groups, who each have different levels of privacy expectations, requirements for attending (public: none, OSU school groups: may be part of a grade), and thus different levels and forms of obtaining consent to do research required. Plus, we’re trying to video record our entire population, so getting signatures from 150,000+ visitors per year just isn’t feasible. However, some of the research we’re doing will be our typical video recording that is more in-depth than just the anonymized overall timing and tracking and visitor recognition from exhibit to exhibit.

What this means is a whole stack of IRB protocols that someone has to manage. At current count, I am managing four: one for my thesis, one for eyetracking in the Visitor Center for looking at posters and such, one for a side project involving concept mapping, and one for the general overarching video recording for the VC. The first three have been approved and the last one is in the middle of several rounds of negotiation on signage, etc., as I’ve mentioned before. Next up we need to write a protocol for the wave tank video reflections, and one for groundtruthing the video-recording-to-automatic-timing-tracking-and-face-recognition data collection. In the meantime, the concept mapping protocol has been open for a year and needs to be closed. My thesis protocol has bee approved nearly as long, went through several deviations in which I did things out of order or without getting updated approval from IRB, and now itself soon needs to be renewed. Plus, we already have revisions to the video recording protocol staff once the original approval happens. Thank goodness the eyetracking protocol is already in place and in a sweet spot time-wise (not needing renewal very soon), as we have to collect some data around eyetracking and our Magic Planet for an upcoming conference, though I did have to check it thoroughly to make sure what we want to do in this case falls under what’s been approved.

On the positive side, though, we have a fabulous IRB office that is willing to work with us as we break new ground in visitor research. Among them, us, and the OSU legal team we are crafting a strategy that we hope will be useful to other informal learning institutions as they proceed with their own research. Without their cooperation, though, very little of our grand plan would be able to be realized. Funders are starting to realize this, too, and before they make a final award for a grant they require proof that you’ve discussed the basics of your project at least with your IRB office and they’re on board.

One Month’s Worth

Posted on by | 1 Reply

How much progress have I made on my thesis in the last month? Since last I posted about my thesis, I have completed the majority of my interviews. Out of 30 I need, I have all but four completed, and three of the four remaining scheduled. Out of about 20 eyetracking sessions, I have completed all but about 7, with probably 3 of the remaining scheduled. I also presented some preliminary findings around the eye-tracking at the Geological Society of America conference in a digital poster session. Whew!

It’s a little strange to have set a desired number of interviews at the beginning and feel like I have to fulfill that and only that number, rather than soliciting from a wide population and getting as many as I could past a minimum. Now, if I were to get a flood of applicants for the “last” novice interview spot, I might want to risk overscheduling to compensate for no-shows (which, as you know, have plagued me). On the other hand, I risk having to cancel if I got an “extra” subject scheduled, which I suppose is not a big deal, but for some reason I would feel weird canceling on a volunteer – would it put them off from volunteering for research in the future??

Next up is processing all the recordings, backing them up, and then getting them transcribed. I’ll need to create a rubric to score the informational answers as something along the lines of 100% correct, partially correct, or not at all correct. Then it will be coding, finding patterns in the data and categorizing those patterns, and asking someone to serve as a fellow coder to verify my codebook and coding once I’ve made a pass through all of the interviews. Then I’ll have to decide if the same coding will apply equally to the questions I asked during the eyetracking portion, since I didn’t dig as deeply to root out understanding completely as I did in the clinical interviews, but I still asked them to justify their answers with “how do you know” questions.

We’ll see how far I get this month.

Defining an audience

Posted on by | Leave a reply

It seems that a convenience sample really is the only way to go for my project at this stage. I have long entertained the notion that some kind of randomization would work to my benefit in some abstract, cosmic way. The problem is, I’m developing a product for an established audience. As much as I’d like to reach out and get new audiences interested, that will have to come later.

That sounds harsh, which is probably why I hadn’t actually considered it until recently. In reality, it could work toward my larger goal of bringing in new audience members by streamlining the development process.

I’ve discovered that non-gamers tend to get hung up on things that aren’t actually unique to Deme, but are rather common game elements with which they’re not familiar. Imagine trying to design a dashboard GPS system, then discovering that a fair number of your testers aren’t familiar with internal combustion engines and doubt they will ever catch on. I need people who can already drive.

Games—electronic, tabletop or otherwise—come with a vast array of cultural norms and assumptions. Remember the first time you played a videogame wherein the “Jump” button—the button that was just simply always “Jump” on your console of choice—did something other than jump?* It was like somebody sewed your arms where your legs were supposed to be, wasn’t it? It was somehow offensive, because the game designers had violated a set of cultural norms by mapping the buttons “wrong.” There’s often a subtle ergonomic reason that button is usually the “Jump” button, but it has just as much to do with user expectations.

In non-Deme news, we’re all excited to welcome our new Senior Aquarist, Colleen Newberg. She comes to us from Baltimore, but used to work next door at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. I learned last week that she is a Virginian, leaving Sid as the lone Yankee on our husbandry team. We’ve got some interesting things in the works, and Collen has been remarkably cool-headed amidst a torrent of exhibit ideas, new and changing protocols and plumbing eldritch and uncanny.

 

*I’ve personally observed that button-mapping has become less standardized as controllers have become more complex. I could be wrong, though—my gameplay habits do not constitute a large representative sample. Trigger buttons, of course, would be an exception.

The influence of the visitor cyborgs

Posted on by | Leave a reply

Well the data collection for my research has been underway for nearly 2 months now, how time flies! For those of you new to this project, my research centers on documenting the practice of science center docents as they interact with visitors. Data collection includes video observations of voluntary docents at HMSC using “visitor-mounted” looxcie cameras, as well as pre- and post-observation interviews with those participating docents.

“Visitor-eye view using the looxcies”

My current focus is getting the video observations of  each of the 10 participating docents collected. In order to conduct a post observation interview (which asks docents to reflect on their practice), I need to get about 10-15 minutes of video data of each of the docents interacting with the public. This doesn’t sound like much, but when you can’t guarantee a recruited family will interact with a recruited docent,  and an actual interaction will likely only last from 30 seconds to a few minutes, it takes a fair few families wearing cameras to get what you need. However, I’m finding this process really enjoyable both in getting to know the docents and meeting visitors.

When I first started this project I was worried that visitors would be a little repelled about the idea of having their whole visit recorded. What I’m actually finding is that either a) they want to help the poor grad student complete her thesis, b) they think the cameras are fun and “want a go” or c) they totally want one of the HMSC tote bags being used as an incentive (what can I say, everyone loves free stuff right?!) The enthusiasm for the cameras has gone as far as one gentleman running up to a docent, jumping up and down and shouting “I’m wearing a camera, I’m wearing a camera!” Additionally, and for those star trek fans out there, a number of visitors and colleagues alike have remarked how much wearing a looxcie makes a person look like a borg (i.e. cyborg), particularly with that red light thing…

Now how, may you ask, does that not influence those lovely naturalistic interactions you’re supposed to be observing? Well, as many of us qualitative researchers know, that unless you hide the fact you are observing a person (an element our IRB process is not particularly fond of) you can never truly remove that influence, but you can assume that if particular practices are observed often enough, they are part of the landscape you are observing. The influence of the cameras may alter how naturalistic that interaction may be, but that interaction is still a reflection of social behaviors taking place. People do not completely change their personality and ways of life simply because a camera is around; more likely any behavior changes may simply be over- or under-exaggerated normative actions. And I am finding patterns, lots of patterns, in the discourse and action taking place between docents and visitors.

However, I am paying attention to how visitors and docents react to the cameras. When filtering the footage for interactions, I look out for any discourse that indicates camera influence is an issue. As examples, the docent in the “jumping man” footage reacts surprised to the man’s sudden shouting, open’s his eyes wide and nervously laughs – to which I noted on the video that the interaction from then on may irregular. In one clip I have a docent talking non-stop about waves seemingly without taking a breath for nearly 8 minutes – to which I noted seemed unnatural in comparison to their other shorter dialogue events. Another clip has a docent bursting out laughing at a visitor wearing one of the looxices attached to his baseball cap using a special clip I have (not something I expected!) – to which I noted would have likely made the ability for the visitor to forget about the looxcie less possible.

All in all, however, most visitors remark they actually forget they are wearing the camera as they visit goes on, simply because they are distracted by their actual visit. This makes me happy, as the purpose of incorporating the looxcies was to reduce the influence of being videod as a whole. Visitors forget to a point where, during pilots, one man actually walked into the bathroom wearing his looxcie, and recorded some footage I wasn’t exactly intending to observe… suffice to say, I instantly deleted that video and and updated my recruitment spiel to include a reminder not to take the cameras in to the bathroom. Social science never ceases to surprise me!

Visitor datum one: Visit motivation

Posted on by | Leave a reply

Despite our fancy technology, there are some pieces of data we have to gather the old-fashioned way: by asking visitors. One piece we’d like to know is why visitors chose to visit on this particular occasion. We’re building off of John Falk’s museum visitor motivation and identity work, which began with a survey that asks visitors to rate a series of statements on Likert (1-5) scales as to how applicable they are for them that day, and reveals a rather small set of motives driving the majority of visits. We also have used this framework in a study of three of our local informal science education venues, finding that an abbreviated version works equally well to determine which (if any) of these motivations drives visitors. The latest version, tried at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, uses photos along with the abbreviated number of statements for the visitors to identify their visit motivations.

We’re implementing a version on an iPad kiosk in the VC for a couple of reasons: first, we genuinely want to know why folks are visiting, and want to be able to correlate identity motivations with the automated behavior, timing, and tracking data we collect from the cameras. Second, we hope people will stop long enough for us to get a good reference photo for the facial recognition system. Sneaky, perhaps, but it’s not the only place we’re trying to position cameras for good reference shots. And if all goes well with our signage, visitors will be more aware than ever that we’re doing research, and that it is ultimately aimed at improving their experience. Hopefully that awareness will allay most of the final fears about the embedded research tools that we are hoping will be minimal to start with.