Post 6/19-6/23

This week we dove deeper into our project. Because of Anna’s amazing recruiting we had a surge in responses to our online survey. This was such a relief, especially since we had such a difficult time identifying and reaching out to various grief groups. Meagan and I did a lot of recruitment for in-person grief support groups around Bloomington last week, and early this week we made follow-up calls to try and get a hold of the group coordinators. I received two calls back from grief coordinators and I was so excited to tell them more about our research. They were willing to pass our survey link along which got me really amped up. It is just really rewarding to know that all of our recruitment efforts are starting to pay off.

Since we received a surge of responses we were able to continue coding in dedoose. Coding has gotten easier the more we do it. Our conversations over our choice of codes has been very helpful in leading to discussions over the themes we are noticing and what they may imply for the prototype we want to create. We have been using sticky notes to map out our codes which has made it much easier to visualize. On Thursday Meagan and I regrouped our codes into a main theme and subthemes.

In regard to our timeline, Anna says that we are on top of things and I would have to agree. Recruiting participants and coding data have been our major tasks for the past week. In regard to failures, I would have to say my ability to leave messages has to improve. In one callback message I received I was informed that I have a “very dainty” voice and that I talk too fast when I leave messages. After listening to that message I have been more conscious when leaving messages.

This picture is of some of our codes for our open response questions

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These are pictures of the call log on my phone from recruiting potential participants and following up with them.  Meagan and I split the calling, so she has additional phone calls.

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Now that we are starting to reach information saturation Anna has encouraged us to start investigating wire framing tools to use for our prototype. James suggested Lucidchart. Meagan and I are going to check it out this weekend and then make a small slideshow to present our findings to Anna. It is really exciting to be at the point where we can start to think about what we want our end product to be.

Meetings with Anna have been super helpful, as they always are. This week we met at least twice a day to discuss where we are. I think it is super helpful to meet a couple of times a day because it serves as a good check point to see where we all are because a lot happens between our morning and afternoon meetings. This week we also had a meeting with Patrick. The meeting was kind of overwhelming for me because Patrick has so many amazing ideas of where our project can go. I am used to having a set final product in mind so this is just something new. Anna has said that where Patrick has these great ideas, James can help us to narrow down what we would specifically like to create for our grievers. Knowing this helped me to feel a little less overwhelmed, but my mind was still swimming with ideas.

We received our peer review from week 4. Our feedback was super helpful. It pointed out many of the small things we overlooked in our first draft. The feedback we received about our introduction helped us to make it stronger. We needed to have more support from other sources, which we added in. Receiving feedback about some of the wording in our paper was also helpful. I write the way I speak, so in the sections I wrote it was great to have someone point out places that were not clear so that Meagan and I could work together to reword the sentences for clarity. Here is the link to our reviewer response table https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HGQbf5sCXETxoGjCpZXnDe8yd31MtZy2lor8-W8oODY/edit?usp=sharing

We discussed authorship with Anna this week as well. She suggested Meagan and I talk about authorship order in regards to our paper. Neither of us are particularly passionate about having our name come before the other persons, so we are going to wait and see how the final contributions to the paper add up before we decide who should be listed first. Anna plans of submitting our work to CHI. She has told us that once the summer is over she will most likely g through our paper and adjust it to fit the guidelines of CHI and any additional data she finds throughout the research.

Meagan and I are not yet in the stage of having a visual of what our project will end up looking like, but we have a few ideas. We are leaning towards a mobile app or website for grievers and possibly their loved ones, to use.  We want to conduct a few of our in-person interviews before be decide what services we should try to implement in our final product because we want to have something that has the potential to benefit the greatest number of people.

My personal website is definitely a work in progress, but here is the link to it. I’m currently in the pickle where I need to choose a background for my website but I have yet to come across something I like more than the flamingos I originally chose as a placeholder. My website still needs a lot of work. Here is a link to my website https://maxmgirard.wixsite.com/home

I also made a professional twitter. It has no tweets yet, but that’s okay. Here is the link to my twitter https://twitter.com/max_girard10

Here is a picture of Petey. He is a two-week old foster kitten that my mom is taking care of

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