Week 3 – Editing and Finalizing the Survey
Hello! Welcome back!
This week I was gone for the senior trip and wasn’t able to spend as much time as I wanted on my project. Nevertheless, I do have some updates on how my survey is going and my next steps.
First, since my last blog, I finished creating my survey and have sent it along to get it approved along with my IRB. My survey contains 6 background/demographics questions and the rest of the 30 questions are broken down into the three parts that I mentioned in my last post which are music, mental health, and music and mental health. For the music section, I asked if they listened to music growing up, are involved in music-related activities, spend most of their free time listening to music, and more. For the mental health section, I asked more emotion-specific questions like if they felt overwhelmed frequently or felt confident in their abilities to handle difficult situations. Lastly, for the music and mental health section, I asked how music has hurt or improved their mental well-being like reducing or increasing their negative thought patterns.
Also, when finalizing this survey with Professor Mommaerts, I put a lot of thought into creating the questions, thinking about the flow, and re-wording some questions to fit the survey better.
For example, one question I wrote was “Listening to music improves my concentration during stressful times.” My mentor then mentioned the point if I was going to analyze the passive vs. active manner of music since in my background questions I asked if the participant played an instrument. Then, I would have to create another question after to ask if “Playing music improves my concentration during stressful times.” However, I couldn’t assume all my participants play an instrument so I would need to put an answer option of “Not Applicable.” But this led to another rabbit hole since it’s best to keep the answer options constant throughout the survey, meaning I would have to add this N/A option for each question which wouldn’t be necessary for most of them. So, then I re-worded the question to just ask music in general. The question became “Music improves my…” In the end, it was a lot of brainstorming and editing but I learned a lot about how to phrase questions well.
Now, for future steps, I am waiting for feedback on my survey and IRB form. Hopefully, everything gets approved so I can begin my data-collecting process as soon as possible. I want to give myself enough time to gather a sufficient amount of data before I start analyzing.
That’s all for today. Thank you for reading and see you next time!
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