This is a static copy of In the Rose Garden, which existed as the center of the western Utena fandom for years. Enjoy. :)

#1 | Back to Top11-10-2013 10:45:40 AM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
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Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I'm going to hope this is acceptable to post here. If it's not, of course, I would understand it's being moved/deleted/whatever. I'm going to work on the pretense that you guys know I don't spam you though, and hope you look kindly on it.

So, I'm taking a research methods class this semester as one of my prereqs for nursing school, and we're all doing little term-papers that involve surveys. Everyone has their own thing, but the class has been broken down into groups of ~6 people to create surveys (so that each individual survey features the questions of six or so different projects). Everyone in each group is supposed to (nonrandomly, I know) distribute their survey to ~17 friends and family members, so that everyone in a group ends up with ~100 responses to their questions. Give or take.

My problem is that I don't really have 17 close friends. I don't even quite manage that number if you enlarge friends to encompass close acquaintances. So I was really hoping that even just a few of you might be willing to volunteer to take the survey online. It shouldn't be /too/ long, and would totally be a great way to kill time if you ever wanted to do that. The survey says it takes ~30 minutes, but I suspect you can finish it in a good bit less than that unless you're really thinking about your responses extensively before jotting them down. The subjects are diverse. I don't know what anyone's questions are other than mine though and, of course, I can't tell you which those are since that might bias stuff.

Anyways, the link is https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HM7W7P3

I'd totally appreciate it if even just like, two or three people could take it and help me chip away at my total goal (but if more wanted to then hey - even better).

If you do take it, if you could either pm me or post here, just so I know how many people I still need to hunt down, that would be super-fantastic. Who provides which actual answers will remain entirely anonymous, both to me and to anyone else involved in the project. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me about those too.

Many thanks. But, again, I'm sorry if anyone feels that this is a really inappropriate place to post such a request.

Last edited by Valeli (11-10-2013 11:49:22 AM)

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#2 | Back to Top11-10-2013 11:39:41 AM

Mylene
Fighting Evil By Moonlight
From: Next to Paradox
Registered: 10-19-2006
Posts: 3704

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I don't know if you can edit the survey at this point or not, but there is a typo in #6. "Though" instead of "thought."

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#3 | Back to Top11-10-2013 11:46:23 AM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I don't think so, since it's no longer under my control. I'll e-mail our teacher and let her know though. It's "her" thing now that it's been condensed into a single set of questions and she posted it up, so maybe she can go in and fix that.

Thanks!

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#4 | Back to Top11-10-2013 06:27:08 PM

purplepolecat
Atlantean Singer
From: Vancouver, B.C.
Registered: 03-26-2007
Posts: 570

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Interesting survey! It took me about 10 minutes. Good luck with the class!


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#5 | Back to Top11-10-2013 10:11:14 PM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Thanks a lot for helping out, much appreciated!

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#6 | Back to Top11-10-2013 11:04:59 PM

satyreyes
no, definitely no cons
From: New Orleans, Louisiana
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 10328
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Nothing inappropriate about it emot-smile  I hope you get the responses you need!

If it were my survey, I might have asked whether the respondent's mobile phone is an Internet-capable smart phone or not.  That seems like it has a bearing on how significant the answers to the other questions about phones are.  But that might not be your topic anyway!

Last edited by satyreyes (11-10-2013 11:11:00 PM)

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#7 | Back to Top11-10-2013 11:06:18 PM

OnlyInThisLight
KING OF ALL DUCKS
Registered: 01-15-2008
Posts: 4412

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Some of the questions felt a bit awkward for a Likert Scale, or didn't allow me to respond accurately (I'm still in school and have no experience in my field; I have no credit card debt).

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#8 | Back to Top11-11-2013 12:36:09 AM

crystalwren
Dark Whisperer
From: Brisbane
Registered: 04-21-2009
Posts: 1172
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Done.

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#9 | Back to Top11-11-2013 12:36:13 AM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Wow, more people. You guys are awesome, thanks a ton.

I'd comment on the other questions, but really I have no idea what they are since the only one's I've seen are my own, so there's simply not a whole lot I can say for now. When I get this finished up sometime in mid-December-ish though, I'll be happy to bump this back up from wherever it has fallen in order to say what I was doing specifically, and to let you all know how it turned out for whatever that's worth.

Again, thanks a lot, I really appreciate you all helping me out.

Last edited by Valeli (11-11-2013 12:38:30 AM)

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#10 | Back to Top11-11-2013 05:02:06 PM

The_Lame_Goat
Rose Smilee
From: Narnia
Registered: 11-13-2012
Posts: 133

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Just finished.


Oh treachery!

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#11 | Back to Top11-12-2013 09:44:53 AM

Honey Bear
Sunlit Gardener (Prelude)
From: England
Registered: 08-01-2011
Posts: 173
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Done. Hope it helps. emot-smile

I know it's a bunch of different surveys but I still found it funny how it jumps from death to how much you use your mobile phone. emot-tongue

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#12 | Back to Top11-12-2013 09:50:14 AM

satyreyes
no, definitely no cons
From: New Orleans, Louisiana
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 10328
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Yes -- in case you're curious about your fellow students' surveys (and of course I don't know which one was yours), I remember a section on mobile phones, two discrete sections about death and attitudes about it, a section on self-esteem, a section that looked to be an abbreviated OCEAN or MBTI instrument, some demographics, and I think there was at least one other section that I can't remember.  Frankly, except for the mobile phones, it seemed like all the sections together made a coherent whole that could be usefully cross-correlated.

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#13 | Back to Top11-12-2013 10:47:59 AM

purplepolecat
Atlantean Singer
From: Vancouver, B.C.
Registered: 03-26-2007
Posts: 570

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I am disappointed that the cell phone usage & attitudes to mortality pages were a non-sequitur. I honestly thought that was the point of the survey. emot-confused


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#14 | Back to Top11-12-2013 12:32:56 PM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Thanks again to everyone who took it since I last thanked people. Am feeling like a broken record here, but I really do appreciate it.

I am disappointed that the cell phone usage & attitudes to mortality pages were a non-sequitur. I honestly thought that was the point of the survey.

That actually would be fun to play with... I think I only get the data on my own set sent back to me, but it would be fun to play with that if I was able to get both and had the time.

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#15 | Back to Top11-15-2013 07:25:04 PM

Alithea
Dark Whisperer
From: Westminster, CO
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 1152
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Don't know if you still need it but i just took the survey. emot-wink


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#16 | Back to Top11-20-2013 09:59:46 PM

Yasha
Bitch Queen
From: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Registered: 10-15-2006
Posts: 6031
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Interesting survey. Also, I only ran into one ambiguously worded question-- usually there are a lot, and they always skew my answers.


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#17 | Back to Top11-21-2013 08:22:19 AM

cscratch
Anthy Assailer
From: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Registered: 07-07-2008
Posts: 70
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Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I just completed the survey as well - hopefully you still needed the participants!

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#18 | Back to Top11-21-2013 07:35:12 PM

SexingTouga24/7/365
is on a BOAT!
Registered: 12-10-2006
Posts: 2267

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I just completed the survey...it seemed so random, topic wise. Can you post the outcome/full study once done? Good Luck.


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#19 | Back to Top11-21-2013 09:35:53 PM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Big thanks again to everyone who took this.

Just in case anyone else wanders in on this post, the data has officially been taken and tallied now, so don't feel compelled to do this any longer. I've had a little look at stuff, and the bits for my project trended as I expected, but didn't end up being statistically significant. Basically, the issue I think comes down to the survey format (Specifically, those open-ended prompts about how you think of death were from mine. I think that the nature of the survey as an electronic click-click-next thing, combined with the default tiny size of those text boxes, led to a lot of the very very brief replies put in there, which mucked things up for me a bit).

The various death bits in the survey actually weren't disjointed/separate people's work. My thing had to do with Mortality Salience induction (making people think about their mortality through the essay prompts) and how it tied into Core Self Evaluation Scores, Self-Esteem, and levels of death anxiety. Mortality salience is a neat thing that I can talk about a bit more when I come back to this (it's been found to play roles in the formation and strengthening of group identities, the support for armed intervention across cultures, and has even been used by insurance companies in advertising), but for now I'll just say that I had a specific hypothesis that Core Self Evaluation Scores would be more strongly correlated with death anxiety resulting from MS induction than the Self-Esteem scores traditionally used in the literature would be, because I felt that CSEs do a better job of encompassing a person's "real" identity and self-value than the traditional self-esteem measures (The CSE scale I used was the one created by Timothy Judge, and the Self-Esteem Scale I used was the 1965 Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.) CSEs, by the way, are a relatively new measure designed around work-place efficiency with one goal being to find people who'll be "good fits" for a company, because they'll be more likely to stick with their job, enjoy their job, or... various other things. I can talk more about them when I come back to this too. But basically, they're just give a much broader view of what /I/ consider to be important factors in how one percieves their own self-worth than many actual self-esteem scales.

So yeah. Various past studies have showed that you need to give people ~5-10 minutes after subjecting them to Mortality Salience before checking on subsequent reaction (it needs to go from a conscious thought process to a subconscious one). My two brief open-ended essay prompts were borrowed from Pyszczynski's 2006 study on Mortality Salience and its effects on nationalism and support for armed intervention across cultures (that's the first that comes to mind... I think those two prompts are actually used in multiple other studies I looked at, but I can't recall them off the top of my head). So in addition to helping out with other people's surveys when you answered the filler questions between the self-esteem measures/essay prompts and the final death anxiety scale (which was 1/4 of the revised Lester-Collett Fear of Death scale. I just took the 7 questions pertaining to death of self, and ignored those focusing on emotions pertaining to death of others), the idea was to give people enough time to have that fade out of consciousness.

Ultimately, people overwhelmingly took "brief" very literally. Which, again, I'm sure wasn't helped by the default tiny size of the text box. I think the goal is to get closer to a page or so out of participants, which this just didn't lend itself to well. I want to get the average word count of the replies to each question, but it was quite low. Some people skipped it entirely (there was still no statistically significant findings after accounting for them, and excluding them from the set). As a side note though, I'm hesitant to /entirely/ explain away the unanticipated results this way because multiple previous studies have shown that things as brief as walking past a funeral home can adequately induce mortality salience in participants. So there might be additional issues I need to uncover. Age on the survey skewed young, and different age groups do have different responses. I haven't found any studies showing age-based differences on this particular aspect though (death anxiety measures after ms induction).

Anyways, I really appreciate everyone's help. I'd never have gotten this put together without all of you, and three or so other people in my class I'm sure would thank you as well, if they knew how many replies came from here. In the end, I ended up with an N of 126 (I think, I have to double check, but  around that), which was suitably large for present purposes.

Hopefully this is a suitable "basic" explanation of what I was doing. I'm leaving town for a week this weekend for Thanksgiving, but when I get back I'll finish looking at the data/putting my paper for class together, and after that I will be happy to give everyone here a more in depth run down on stuff. If I figure out who was in my group, I can let you know how their projects went as well. And I think I can get (most) of the final data results copied here as well, for anyone who wanted to see that. I can get the data for my project at least. I think for the everyone elses as well, but I don't want to promise that just yet.

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#20 | Back to Top11-21-2013 10:00:15 PM

satyreyes
no, definitely no cons
From: New Orleans, Louisiana
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 10328
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I'd love to see your more expanded version when it's ready!  emot-smile

So in short, to make sure I've got this right, you used the essay prompts to induce your participants to think about death.  Then you measured self-esteem using two different instruments -- one that you prefer and one that the literature prefers -- to see which instrument was a better predictor of death anxiety, measured through the multiple-choice questions near the end.

If I have that right, then I have a question!  The project is about mortality salience, but how do you know that mortality salience has anything to do with your results?  The correlations you are measuring are between self-esteem scores and the multiple-choice death anxiety scale.  Isn't it possible that those correlations would be the same regardless of whether you first used open-ended prompts to induce mortality salience?  Did you have some sort of control group who didn't receive the open-ended prompts, in order to test the degree to which mortality salience heightened death anxiety?

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#21 | Back to Top11-22-2013 07:53:46 AM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Yeah, that's pretty much an on-point description.

Your question is actually a question I had too, and I was planning on having a control for this initially because doing it without one felt inherently wrong. It probably was inherently wrong. Due to the vagaries of my community college class I ended up not doing that though. Beyond that, if I had done it, I would have had to do it in another group's survey, which would have involved various different intervening questions, which could have thrown things off and made for a less than ideal comparison anyways.

A bad answer is that we already know about the nature of such effects due to previous studies like Routledge and Juhl's 2010 one "When Death Thoughts Lead to Death Fears: Mortality Salience Increases Anxiety for Individuals Who Lack Meaning In Life" (Cognition and Emotion, 2010. 24(5). 848-854), as well as Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & McGregor's "Terror Management Theory and Self-Esteem: Evidence that Increased Self-Esteem Reduces Mortality Salience Effects" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997. 72(1). 24-36), among others.

Even there though, you're right that I'd have wanted a control group to check up on the CSE score stuff at the very least, since the previous studies are focused on Self-Esteem and it's effects on MS induction. So what I did isn't in imminent danger of getting published anywhere, but for community college purposes CSEs depends enough on self-esteem that this is what ended up happening, given that previous studies have already established how self-esteem works with MS and impacts resulting anxiety (The big deal about CSEs is that they are supposed to be a measure of an underlying mechanic/attribute in individuals that allegedly explains how they form various related traits such as self-esteem, neuroticism, locus of control, and generalized self-efficacy. Those traits are, in fact, very strongly related to CSE scores. I don't have any citation for that off-hand, but various people have looked at the extent to which they all correlate with CSE scores and it's quite high. Especially self-esteem.

So... if you buy the research/findings of Judge and the other people who developed CSE's, CSEs are actually the principle attribute in individuals through which they determine/develop the particular levels of self-esteem that they end up with. So if self-esteem's relationship with MS induction has been established, it broadly follows that a relationship with CSE also exists to some significant extent.

Again though, you're right that if this was more serious I'd have wanted to take charge of things myself and get the control group set up. That's probably a somewhat disappointing answer.

Last edited by Valeli (11-22-2013 07:57:59 AM)

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#22 | Back to Top11-22-2013 09:15:49 AM

satyreyes
no, definitely no cons
From: New Orleans, Louisiana
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 10328
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

I don't think it's disappointing!  You were operating in a constrained environment where it would have been quite difficult to set up things like control groups or question order randomization or other good practices, so you began by making some simplifying assumptions with some grounding in the literature.  But I may have misstated my question.  Let's grant your assumptions: low self-esteem definitely heightens MS-induced death anxiety; CSEs can measure self-esteem; therefore there is good reason to expect that CSEs should predict how much MS induction will heighten death anxiety.  Fine and good.  And you say your results, while not statistically significant, pointed in the direction you expected, by which I think you mean that Fear of Death score was more strongly correlated with CSE-measured self-esteem than with Rosenberg-measured self-esteem.  Also fine and good.

But here's the thing.  I don't understand how these correlations answer the research question.  The question, if I understood it, was not which scale would better predict death anxiety.  The question was which scale would better predict MS-induced death anxiety, since that's what's assumed to be correlated with self-esteem.  But people presumably have some death anxiety even when they haven't recently answered questions about mortality.  So, in the absence of a control group, how do you tease that baseline level of death anxiety apart from the part of death anxiety that was induced by MS?

It seems to me -- and again, I don't know what I'm talking about as far as the subject matter, only as far as research design -- that you would need to do one of two things to make the study work: either have a control group whose death anxiety scores you could subtract out of the study group's death anxiety scores to measure specifically MS-induced death anxiety; or make the further assumption that low self-esteem does not heighten baseline death anxiety.  If self-esteem has nothing to do with baseline death anxiety, the study is fine, because then all systematic deviation from the mean in Fear of Death scores is due to MS induction in both high- and low-self-esteem groups, and you don't actually need to tease the components of death anxiety apart to test your hypothesis.  But if self-esteem does influence baseline death anxiety, then some of the variation you're capturing actually has nothing to do with MS induction.  This might cut either in favor of your hypothesis or against it.

You can probably tell that I'm not one of the people who gave short answers to your open-ended prompts.  emot-rolleyes  Thanks for putting up with these clumsy questions from the laity!

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#23 | Back to Top11-22-2013 10:54:01 AM

Valeli
Thorn of Death
Registered: 12-05-2006
Posts: 481
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Oh, I think I see what you mean.

I need to get back to this when I have a bit more time. At a brief glance I think you're right in that the results do conflate death anxiety and induced death anxiety (unless, as you said, Self Esteem has no bearing on the baseline. Which I don't know about, but would find somewhat hard to believe at a guess).

But at the same time, all of the death anxiety here is also linked to the MS induction... there's no way to available here to try and parse out how much anxiety was added by that. But it's still a universal factor that everyone is exposed to. I'm not entirely clear on why we'd need to have separate levels if we're only interested with comparing correlations after ms induction, and aren't trying to figure out the extent to which that induction further "aggravated" preexisting anxiety.

I think I see what you're getting at though... You're suggesting that the /specific/ portion of death anxiety specifically brought about by the MS induction is the only portion that should be checked for a correlation against self-esteem and cse scores? Sort of like getting everyone to complete the death anxiety scale both pre-induction(A) and post-induction(B), and using each individual's changed value (B-A = Anxiety Caused by Induction) as the number to evaluate rather than simply using the number of a post-induction anxiety scale (B = Total Anxiety after Induction)?  That would certainly be a neat way to go about it. I still feel like I'm not entirely on the wrong track using Total Anxiety post-induction as the value to correlate to though, because with that we're still correlating to "Anxiety after Induction," which remains categorically different from a generalized anxiety prior to induction. And even if the MS specific contribution isn't split out, like I said, it remains a universal contribution across the board.

I probably need to get back to this later when I have a bit more time to think about it though. Must head out now. But that's a good thought. I'm probably going to think about it more and talk about it in my paper as a possible issue.

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#24 | Back to Top11-22-2013 12:16:34 PM

satyreyes
no, definitely no cons
From: New Orleans, Louisiana
Registered: 10-16-2006
Posts: 10328
Website

Re: Research Method Class (Please Assist?)

Valeli wrote:

I think I see what you're getting at though... You're suggesting that the /specific/ portion of death anxiety specifically brought about by the MS induction is the only portion that should be checked for a correlation against self-esteem and cse scores? Sort of like getting everyone to complete the death anxiety scale both pre-induction(A) and post-induction(B), and using each individual's changed value (B-A = Anxiety Caused by Induction) as the number to evaluate rather than simply using the number of a post-induction anxiety scale (B = Total Anxiety after Induction)?

That's exactly what I meant!  Thank you for putting it so well!  I suggested it not so much because I think it's the only viable experimental design as because I thought that's what you were trying to get at emot-biggrin  If it's not MS's contribution to death anxiety specifically that you're studying -- if you're interested in death anxiety and you've chosen for other reasons to heighten that anxiety with MS induction, for example because prior research suggests that that's how you get a strong self-esteem linkage -- then I just misunderstood the research question and I don't think there's anything wrong with the design. emot-smile

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