Week 4, Part 2: Wednesday, June 14 – Friday, June 16

This post is all about the second half of week 4! To see what I did earlier in the week, check out part 1 of this blog post here.

Wednesday afternoon we had our weekly Wednesday Workshop. This week we discussed writing abstracts, peer reviewing papers, and creating a professional online presence. Abstracts are short summaries of papers that are often used to give people the general gist of your paper in a paragraph. Often times, other researchers may decide if they are even going to read your paper based off of the abstract, so it is important that your abstract gives enough detail about your objective, methods used, findings, conclusions, and the implications of your study. We also discussed peer reviewing papers, which is an important aspect of academia. Peer reviewing papers helps ensure that published papers are the best they can be, and it allows you to get feedback on your work from other experts in your field. For the REU, we are going to be anonymously peer reviewing each others work each week to improve all of our papers, provide ideas, and have the opportunity to see what everyone else is doing. Our third topic of the workshop was creating a professional online presence. It is important to be seen online, be it through a website where you showcase your work, a LinkedIn account to connect with potential employers, or a Twitter to share work and connect with others around the world. We spent some time looking at other peoples personal websites to get a better sense of what we should include in ours. It was a good reminder for me that I should keep updating my personal website (which I plan to spend time on this weekend).

After the meeting Sergio and I worked on improving our paper. We spent time outlining our Abstract and turning the outline of our Introduction section into a draft. We also finished preparing our patient data for analysis, and spent some time figuring out what the best way to go about testing and training the patient data in Dedoose.

Thursday morning we uploaded the health care provider transcripts into Dedoose and spent the morning segmenting the transcripts, ensuring that we pulled out all of the major quotes. I then worked on completing my Peer Review for the week. Thursday afternoon we met with Tom to continue discussing the themes for the provider data. The importance of the themes from providers was to help guide our focus group study, as we wanted to be able to identify what providers focus on the most when it come to helping patients prioritize and manage the treatment of discordant chronic comorbidities. The picture below shows our provider themes at the end of Thursday.

Provider Themes All.JPG

Friday morning I worked on taking the first of our patient training tests in Dedoose. The tests are used to ensure that all researchers agree on where different quotes should be placed, and they allow us to determine our interrated rate, which is a measure used in qualitative analysis to determine if all researchers understand and agree on the major themes of your data.

We also had our weekly ProHealth Design Meeting, where we all meet to share what we have done and what we still have to do. This week the theme was Time Travel, and we all had to share where/when we go if we had the ability to time travel. Personally, I said that I wanted to travel into the future, where everyone had the opportunity to travel in space and easily explore the universe.

The rest of the day Friday I spent time finishing our deliverables for the week, prepping and starting some of next weeks work, and writing this blog post.

In terms of our schedule, we have had to make some slight adjustments. I’ve put our adjustments in purple. Our goal is to catch up next week, and if everything goes according to plan we should be able to jump back on schedule.

  • Week 4 – Segmenting, affinity diagrams, and themes, for the Health Care Providers, also start IRB, continue testing patient data
  • Week 5 – Codes and Dedoose for the Health Care Providers, design focus group study, finish testing patient data, submit IRB
  • Week 6 – Conduct focus group study, segment, affinity diagrams, themes, codes, design Participatory Design study
  • Week 7 – Analyze prototypes, start creating wireframes
  • Week 8 – Writing
  • Week 9 – Writing
  • Week 10 – Writing and Submissions!

Until next time!