Everyone at the Center for ABCs is busy running, designing, or interpreting their studies. One of the most time consuming but simple jobs the employees have is translating their participants answers from the hundreds of responses into simple comprehensible numbers that can be analyzed as a group of participants. This job is perfect for me as an intern because it is simple and no one wants to do it. This week I put participants' word responses into categories. Each of the 66 participants had a pre and post session in which they filled in blanks to make 49 words (total of 6,468 different responses). The participants made words that were neutral, aggressive, ambiguous, or non words and I tallied them accordingly. I got very good at finding the most efficient way to approach it. For example, instead of looking at every word and categorizing it, I realized that the most words are neutral, and if I can just pick out the words that I know are aggressive or ambiguous or non words then I can subtract those from the 49 and see that there are 37 or so neutral words without actually looking them up.
The most difficult part of this task was the non-words. Participants made up as many as 15 words. Some of these were obviously just people giving up giving responses such as "cvraw" and "skaroo" which are nonsense. However some of these words were actually things that made sense like names of pasta or "bae" or other words that are common now but not when the key was made in 1999. These situations would really slow me down and the hardest part was learning that in the grand scheme of data it didn't matter and I just had to decide and stick with my decision where I would categorize it.
I'm learning that this office is really just that. Despite the incredible research and brilliant people it still feels low pressure and friendly and just like a normal office.