William Ma Entry #3, Getting started on my individual project

Three weeks really flew by. Half way through the lab, I have learned a lot from my projects. For the Meta-analysis, I have screened 35 articles and identified about 75 measures of self regulation so far. There are 15 people who are working on the same part of the project (identifying measures of self-regulation) with me. As you can see in the picture below, our productivity has increased drastically over the past couple of weeks. (The Cumulative Total is the number of papers we need to screen and the bar on top is the total number of papers). With this rate, we will be able to finish this stage of the meta-analysis project in three weeks, which is the time I leave. I'm proud of being on this wonderful team and I am also proud of what we have accomplished.

  

One thing that I didn't mention before about the meta-analysis project is that each paper is screened by two people. The answers are then compared to ensure validity. Any disagreements are settled through communications between the two coders and Dr. Sulik himself. If each paper was only screened by one coder, we would've finished this stage by now, but that would sacrifice the validity of the project, which is crucial in scientific research.

For CSRP, I am still learning data cleaning by watching a lot of youtube videos. I also spent some time last week looking for a website/app to allow assessors of CSRP videochat and sharescreen with participants who have left Chicago. Skype would not work since we are trying to make this as simple as possible for both the assessors and the participants (many assessors are the elderly who are not great with technology). After going through a couple of websites, I found one that's called Zoom that's free and easy to use. I then made a manual for both the assessors and the participants.

Now, my individual project. After discussing with Dr. Sulik, I have decided to research the ways that we can measure our neighborhoods' impact on us. As someone who has moved a lot and lived in many neighborhoods, I have always been interested in the characteristics of neighborhoods and how different neighborhood's can impact people differently. Therefore, in the next three weeks, I will set aside the meta-analysis and work on a literature review of the way people have measured neighborhoods as well as things worth noting when doing so.