All the weeks in January, I had marveled how it was still possible to ride my bike to the university and back. I should have known that I was pushing my luck as Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were below freezing most of the day. I managed to bike on Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday was icy enough that I decided to take the bus. But the temperatures had gone up and it looks like I’ll be able to bike my last few days here. Overall, biking to work was definitely one of the better choices that I made.
Since I had 30 participants by the end of the last week, I could start turning to analysis. But, there were still people that had wanted to participate in the experiment, so I tried to schedule everyone up. I used the opportunity to be better on the counterbalancing so that everything remained better balanced as well.
There were actually a fair number of people in the pipeline. At the end of Thursday, we had 36 participants. I stated that I was no longer actively recruiting people; we would only run the experiment for people who really wanted to participate. Then, Friday afternoon, we got a phone call from another interested person. So, we will have a couple of participants this coming week as well. This is the first time in my running of user studies that I have been so lucky in recruiting. It has gone better than I could ever imagine.
Aside from running the experiment, I was able to finish up a draft of a journal article, and get it ready for sending into the journal. The shoe also ended up on the other foot as on Friday, I was suddenly requested to review a journal article. Having spent some time the past weeks responding to reviewer comments, I at least had an idea about how to write my comments.
The rest of my time looking at what I needed to do for analyzing the data and how I was going to do it. It looks like I’ll finally have the opportunity to use R. Strangely, I’ve been surrounded by people who have used R in their research the last ten years, but I’ve only used it once for a very non-data analysis thing. However, the first step was obvious, getting data set up so that it can be read and used by R. I hope to spend a little more time with this next week as I also pack and get ready to travel back to Norway.