My goals for this week:

I hope everyone enjoyed their flexibility week! I went to the Southern Highlands from Thursday until Sunday night, where there was no reception. I had such a lovely break, but having no reception meant that I didn’t get to do much coding this week, and I unfortunately was not able to make it to my group’s meeting on Friday. So, my goals for this week were to be briefed on what went on during my group’s meeting, work on my group’s PowerPoint slides for our Week 8 presentation, as well as make a start on my verification report.

Additionally, I thought I would recreate the summary statistics for perceived vulnerability in study 4 that were provided in the Supplementary Material. More details are under the “Successes and Challenges” heading.

Summary statistics for study 4 > Summary statistics table for study 4 provided in the supplementary materials. It relates to the participants’ subjective own vulnerability and the subjective vulnerability of others.

Successes and challenges:

It is important to note that study 4 tested whether people who are objectively vulnerable or subjectively consider themselves/others as vulnerable to COVID-19 would be more likely to adhere to COVID-19 measures after the empathy induction.

My group and I discussed whether we needed to recreate this data for our project, as we felt that it might have been relevant. I believe Victoria asked Jenny if reproducing those statistics was necessary and she confirmed that it wasn’t. Nevertheless, I thought that it would be a useful learning experience for me. Also, since my group had completed their assigned data recreations, I thought that it wouldn’t do me any harm to play around a bit more with our COVID paper data.

I was able to successfully reproduce the means and standard deviations for study 4 in relation to whether participants’ subjective vulnerability (of both themselves and others) would increase motivation to adhere to COVID-19 measures. However, the Empathy group mean + SD for the subjective vulnerability of others only came up with NA for some reason. I am a bit confused as to why that happened, so I will try and figure out a way to fix this!

# Study 4 results including perceived vulnerability

# bed variable = Empathy condition
# 0 = Information only
# 1 = Control
# 2 = Empathy

#Vulnerability (self):

##Information only group mean + SD
info <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 0)
mean(info$Q100_1)
## [1] 2.853659
sd(info$Q100_1)
## [1] 0.9631324
##Control group mean + SD
control <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 1)
mean(control$Q100_1)
## [1] 2.705993
sd(control$Q100_1)
## [1] 0.8628684
##Empathy group mean + SD
empathy <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 2)
mean(empathy$Q100_1)
## [1] 2.81
sd(empathy$Q100_1)
## [1] 0.9140958
#Vulnerability (other):

##Information only group mean + SD
info <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 0)
mean(info$Q100_2)
## [1] 3.351626
sd(info$Q100_2)
## [1] 0.7417828
##Control group mean + SD
control <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 1)
mean(control$Q100_2)
## [1] 3.247191
sd(control$Q100_2)
## [1] 0.6948899
##Empathy group mean + SD
empathy <- study4 %>%
  filter(bed == 2)
mean(empathy$Q100_2)
## [1] NA
sd(empathy$Q100_2)
## [1] NA

In addition to coding, the idea of starting my verification report felt quite overwhelming, but thankfully Jenny had us complete a peer-reviewed draft summary and reaction for our paper a few weeks ago! I started by editing my S&R draft and taking on the feedback that I had received, as well as working on the formatting of my report based on the exemplar that Jenny sent us.

I also wanted to say that my group has done such an amazing job with recreating the statistics and figures from our paper. Although we tried to distribute the workload as much as possible, there were four studies in our paper and five of us in the group, so Victoria and I worked on Study 4 together. However, I can’t help but feel guilty because although I regularly go to Q and As, helped with some of the troubleshooting and worked on the aesthetics of the figure, I feel like I have not contributed to reproducing our paper’s data as much as my other group members. Pulling my weight in any group work is very important to me, so I have made a conscious effort to contribute in other ways.

Additionally, after being filled in on what went on during our group meeting, it seems like the main problem with are having is reproducing the mean for Physical Distancing that was obtained in Study 2.

Next steps in my coding journey:

My steps will be to review the code for Study 4 (which was the study Victoria and I worked on), particularly the summary statistics, to make sure that it matches the Study 4 section in our COVID paper. I will also continue to attend the Q and A sessions, and regularly communicate with my group. Finally, I will watch the verification report guidelines video that Jenny very kindly made for us, and make sure that our code commenting suits those guidelines.

I am also really looking forward to having a meeting with Jenny later this week before we have to present in Week 8!