This week we designed a lot of the activities for our ARC study. Some tweaking still needs to be done before they’re finalized, but overall we have a solid idea of what we’re going to have the participants do.  Julia and I went off and expanded on a lot of the ideas that Fernando and Patrick had set out on our own. For the most part we came up with a lot of detail that can easily be incorporated in and help the study, but there were a few instances where we didn’t properly understand the purpose of an activity and had to go back to the drawing board.

We finished out deliverables for the week, though at time of writing Fernando posted some suggestions for improving the sections that we have written out currently, and as soon as I’m finished with this blog post I’m going to go back to reading to ensure that the statements that I add are accurately cited.

I spoke with Dr. Natarajan about the possibility of a machine learning approach to the forum data, and read a paper where other researchers used a similar approach to process large amounts of qualitative data. There’s a lot of work ahead to learn how to implement this approach, but Nandini and Dr. Natarajan have both offered to help as I stumble through the process so I’m not too worried.

I forgot to write out my timeline last week, so we’re starting from scratch here. This is what I know of so far:

Week 1: Getting to know everyone, learning the ropes of the involved tech, and choosing mentors.

Week 2: Reading papers and getting familiar with the field. In addition some basic planning for how we would conduct our research.

Week 3: More in depth planning of our research.

Week 4: Finish up guides for the TreatYoSelf app and the structure for the ARC activities to make sure everyone is ok with them. Present them at the end of the week and make last minute edits. Either launch the facebook group here or at the beginning of week 5.

Week 5: Facebook group should be on by now. Since there’s going to be separation between the activities when we’re not handling immediate issues or focusing on the data right in front of us there will be a decent amount of downtime. During this downtime we will likely start putting effort into the forum data.

Weeks 6 – 8: Basically the same as week 5, conduct more activities (the order isn’t concrete now), continue reading and writing, and work with the forum data.

Week 9: This week we’ll likely be scrambling to finalize our deliverable, on top of everything else.

Week 10: Final touches and presenting of deliverables.