Paige Scarborough

Paige Scarborough
I think we were a little overwhelmed when we first saw just how many things there were to do, but we’ve made so much progress over the past couple of weeks!

Degree

Psychology ’16

Project Team

We’ve been busy the last few weeks because over the last couple of months, Jenna and Lauren have traveled to multiple schools and have been collecting our teacher measures (PDDBI, student adjustment questionnaire) and our probes data. The music therapy sessions in these classrooms have begun and will continue through May. Because of this, data collection will also continue through May, well after the academic year has finished. Despite us not being able to finish data collection before we leave for the summer (or for some of us, leave for the real world ), the other undergraduates and I have already begun coding and entering data.

I think we were a little overwhelmed when we first saw just how many things there were to do, but we’ve made so much progress over the past couple of weeks scanning, coding, and entering the data that’s been collected thus far! During the last two months, we’ve met at the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development to de-identify and scan all of the teacher measures. We refined the coding scheme for the probes and became reliable, which took some time (coding human behaviors is never easy).  We’ve been meeting every week for 2-4 hours at a time in order to code the probes, and have replaced some of our regularly scheduled meetings with coding hours. Finally, we’ve been entering the data from the scanned teacher measures and our coded probes into spreadsheets on our own time.

At our next meeting, we might get to look at a preview of our data and see some of the fruits of our labor. Lorrie Schmid, the information systems manager at the Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI), has been helping us analyze the data that we’ve entered and will give us a brief overview of what it says thus far. I think we are all looking forward to our peek at the data, but until then, I guess we’ll just keep coding!