Recently in BMI Category

Today is my last day in the lab before graduation...kind of bittersweet. Today I continued calling and entering in the IPP database. I called a lot earlier than usual today and was able to get a hold of a surprising amount of people. Unfortunately everyone that left a message or I talked to didn't qualify for the study and I was unable to schedule the last girl!

I want to also thank everyone that I worked with over this past year! I learned a lot working in the lab and am excited to apply my new knowledge to my next job and eventually graduate school!

Today I spent a majority of my time calling for the BMI study and then I did some IPP entry. I called about 75 families and returned all the messages from the day before. I was able to get a hold of a lot of people, however, all of their daughters were screen out and I wasn't able to schedule anyone. Tomorrow is my last day in the lab so I really hope that I can schedule the last girl for the study.

Today I spent the entire time calling for the BMI study. I was able to schedule the last boy and now we just need one more girl!! I called about 75 families and was not able to get a hold of very many people and most of their kids were at school so they were not able to give me current measurements. I have almost 20 calls to return tomorrow so hopefully one of them will qualify! I went to check the voice mails right before I left and there were already 4 parents that were interested in having their kids participant in the study. That was really exciting and it looks like Josh and his team are going to be able to finish their study.

Again today I worked on entering in survey data in the IPP database and calling for the BMI study. While I was checking the voice mails I realized that two of them were from the same women....at first I thought that I forgot to delete one of them but then realized she gave two different phone numbers in each message. I gave her a call back and ended up talking to her for about 15 minutes. She really wanted her son to participate in the study but unfortunately he didn't qualify for the study. After explaining this to me she gave me a set of new measurements because she was just guessing and was unsure his height and weight. I politely asked if she could measure her son when he gets home from school and I would call her back tomorrow. She agreed and then went off on a tangent and started giving me all these names of her friends that would probably be interested and had sons that would qualify. I thanked her for the information but also explained that our lab is unable to contact them because we get our participant list from a database.

Today I worked on entering data in the IPP database and calling for the BMI study. I tried to return the voicemails that we received but wasn't able to get a hold of the parents so I left them messages to call us back. Also, again today I was having problems leaving messages because many of the machines kept cutting me off...some ended the message before I even got the chance to say my name. I made a note of this in the call log and will be sure to call them back at a later time/date. Josh then taught me how to enter survey data in the IPP database. While I was doing this I noticed the lack of diversity in the families that are in the database and wondered how that was accounted for in all the studies using those participants. Since everyone has very similar demographics I can imagine that it would make it very difficult to generalize any results on Minnesota families.

Today I was came in and continued calling for the BMI study. I called about 60 people and left a voice mail for all but 5 people. There was an hour and a half time period where I didn't talk to a real person. I think this is mainly because I am calling during lunch time hours and many people with 6 year old children are at work or running errands during this time. Everything went smoothly except for I encountered some issues with leaving voice mails on machines. I have noticed lately that a certain phone company has a new system that cuts the message off about a minute in and asks if you are satisfied with your message. I had about 7 messages get cut off by this alert today and was wondering if it might be time for a new voice mail script.

Today I spent the whole time calling for the BMI study. I called about 75 families and returned all the voice mails and was able to schedule the last girl that we need for the study. When I was calling it was very surprising to see that many parents I spoke to today knew their child's height and weight off the top of their head without looking it up. I thought that was interesting because they either knew their measurements really well or were just making something up to make the call go faster. This made me wonder about kids that come into the lab and don't end up qualifying for the study that they have signed up for. I was curious to know if this was a common occurrence or if for the most part parents were pretty accurate with the measurements that they give us.

Today I worked on calling for the BMI study and coding for EFM Validation. I started with the coding and was able to code a full session on my own. I have never done the gift delay task before so it took me a while to read the directions and get a hang of the task. Also during coding I noticed that the experimenter was putting all the cards in the boxes during the card sort task instead of having the child do it. She was following where the child was pointing but I was wondering if this was correct because it didn't give the child the chance to change their mind and make the decision on their own. I made a note of it on my coding sheet and also left a note for Josh. After I was finished coding I returned the voice mail calls for BMI and I wasn't able to get a hold of anyone or schedule anyone new.

Today I worked on BMI for the first two hours and also finished coding for the EFM Validation study. For calling I was able to call about 50 families and return the voice messages we had from this weekend. I didn't speak to many parents on the phone and left a lot of message. I also wasn't able to schedule anyone new for this study. For coding I tried to finish coding the HTKS and Gift Delay portion from a video that didn't have sound. This was very difficult because we didn't know what part of the task the experimenter was on because there were no cues. Josh told me too 99 all the data because we couldn't get an accurate read on what was going on. This shows the importance of double checking all video footage so we are able to use that data in the study.

Today I worked on both IPP data entry and calling for the BMI study. I entered all the new cards with siblings for the first hour I was here. One thing that I noticed while doing this was that some of the cards had impossible birthdays written for siblings....they were either in the future or in the same year as another sibling. I set those cards aside to double check with the parents if that information was correct or they just wrote down the wrong thing. Then I moved into calling and returned the voice mail we had from the day before. The internet was being sketchy so I was only able to call a handful of families and left voice mails for almost all of those. The voice mail was also screened out so I was unable to schedule any new participants today.