April 9: Results
Hello everyone! I hope this post finds you well! As promised last week, I’ll be talking about my results this week. Unfortunately, I don’t come bearing good news ☹️
My results were inconclusive. This means I don’t have evidence either proving or denying my hypothesis that binaural beats help reduce the intensity of a migraine. I suppose it’s better than having my hypothesis denied, but it’s still not quite what I wanted to see. I actually didn’t have enough data to analyze in the first place. Let me explain:
As you all know from my previous post, I created a Google Form with a survey for participants of my study to fill out when they get a migraine attack. In that form, the last question of the first section randomized the audio that the participants listened to for the next thirty minutes while they had a migraine attack. Based on what answer they put (I asked them to pick the option at the top, and I randomized the order of the options), they would get a link to the control tone or the binaural beats track in the next section, along with instructions to listen at a comfortable volume for half an hour. I had a handful of participants enroll, but not many responded to the Secondary Survey when they had a migraine attack. Out of the few responses I got, all of them were the control tone, as that was the tone that randomized as the first option for everyone at that time. One might call it bad luck, but that’s how it ended up working out. So I actually didn’t end up with any data to analyze for the binaural group, leaving me unable to analyze my data. I therefore had to declare my results as inconclusive due to an excessively small sample size.
I know that’s probably not what you were expecting—it definitely wasn’t what I was expecting! I guess this just goes to show that not all research is has a perfect pathway leading to expected results. I’ll take this as a learning experience, and address the small sample size I had to work with in the Discussion section of the Academic Paper I’m writing for AP Research, advising future researchers to use better participant recruitment methods.
That’s all I have for today—thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week 😊
–Bhavitha
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