After finally finishing the data collection portion of my final product, I came to realize how much work goes into conducting surveys through a traditional format. When conducting surveys last year, I always distributed a simple google form through social media and text/email to my target sample. However, since I was calling people this time, data collection was a much slower process. In fact, after calling all of Dr. Dike’s migraine patients three different times, I was only able to extract data from 50% of the target sample. Although I got fewer results than I had expected, Dr. Dike assured me that having data from even twelve patients for a group of relatively new drugs is significant, and he told me about how he had once gotten a paper published with only data from seven patients.
Although I have started the process of data analyzation, I will try again this week to reach out to the patients who did not pick up the phone in a last attempt to expand my sample size. Meanwhile, I have started to familiarize myself with how to run statistical tests on google sheets and excel. Dr. Dike told me that since I have taken statistics, he will let me decide how to analyze the data. As a result, after finding the mean and standard deviation for the individual questions, I have decided to run a matched pairs t-test Overall, the biggest portion of my final product that now remains is writing the research paper.
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After meeting a slight bump on the final product road, it was finally time to get started on formally collecting data. On Friday, I headed over to Dr. Dike’s office and began the process of calling patients to ask them questions about how their quality of life changed after taking certain new migraine medications.
Before I began calling, I felt a slight twinge of nervousness; after all, it had been quite some time since I had cold-called someone. However, after realizing that I had two years of experience in cold-calling, I felt more confident and I carried out the survey process successfully. Out of the initial five patients that Dr. Dike gave me to call, only two patients answered the survey; two of the patients refused to participate and another patient did not pick up the phone. Thus, this made me realize that I would need more time to call patients and collect data than I had originally predicted. With multiple long weekends coming up, I plan on spending full days at Dr. Dike’s office so I can collect all the data and begin the process of formally writing the survey research paper. Looking ahead, I will be giving my Final Presentation to Ms. Bowling’s class on Tuesday. Given that I am not finished with my final product, my presentation will not be an exact replica of what I plan to say at Final Presentation Night. However, I am still excited to share my year’s worth of work and experiences with the eighth graders. Sometimes, roadblocks are hit while we are hard at work on a task, causing us to turn around and start all over again. On Sunday, I talked to Dr. Dike over the phone about my final product because he had mentioned how he had some concerns about the data collection. Since I have to go to school and am unable to collect every migraine patient’s neck circumference and Mallampati score, Dr. Dike and his physician assistant were helping with the data collection. The Mallampati score operates on a subjective scale ranging from 1 to 5, and Dr. Dike began to notice that his perception of a score of 3 was different from his physician assistant’s score of 3. Thus, this made all of the data that was collected by two different people inaccurate.
Because I didn’t want all of the research that I had over migraines to become unusable for my final product, Dr. Dike and I discussed what could be modified about my current final product plan. After some time, we decided that it would be best for me to conduct research about the patient quality of life after the usage of different migraine drugs. Dr. Dike recently started prescribing three new drugs to his migraine patients, and research about its effectiveness would be both beneficial to him and the neurology community. Thus, on Friday, I will begin data collection by calling patients and asking them questions off of the Migraine-Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire version 2.1, a validated survey. |