What were the goals for this week?
The goal for this week was to get some work done on the individual report. It’s been hard for me to focus on doing work lately for several reasons so I aimed to take things slowly and work on it bit by bit.
How did I achieve these goals?
The first thing I did was work on the summary and reaction. I had a draft written up when initially starting on the group project but decided I would start on it from scratch again now armed with the knowledge I had after spending a lot of time working with the findings from the paper and the data. I spent one day doing the summaries, and one day doing the reaction.
I then spent one day pasting over everyones’ code (with the rubber duck comments) into my report rmd file. I spent some time cleaning up the code, as well as editing the rubber duck comments so that it all made sense. Due to everyone working on a different file, I had to do quite a bit of editing so that the writing style was as cohesive and consistent as possible, however, there are still some stylistic differences in the way that we write between each of the plots/tables. I also had to edit the code in order to make it all work in the rmd, by making sure the same packages were not loaded twice, and editing variable names so that the files all manipulated different variables. Furthermore, one of the rubber duck files had an image linked to it, however it was linked to a local file on one of my group member’s computers, so I had to contact them in order to link it to my rmd as well.
The next step was working on the exploratory analyses. To be honest, I still haven’t started, but the workshop on Thursday as well as the help of Jade (my code review partner) really sparked some ideas that I need some feedback on.
My first idea is to see whether there are any correlations between the aspects of music and the dishonesty measures. The authors used different pieces of music as the auditory cue across locations. My aim is to examine the participant ratings of the music in the secular condition, and see whether any of the ratings correlate with the dishonesty measure (the cues were rated on aspects such as happy, sad, fast, slow, etc.). This would be done by plotting a rating/dishonesty plot for all the aspects by which the cue was rated on. E.g x axis would be the rating of that aspect (e.g happiness), and the y axis would be the dishonesty measure mean for participants (at that location) who scored that aspect on the x-axis.
My second idea is to look at whether there is a difference in the way that male and female participants rate music. Are either genders more likely to rate the music higher on a certain aspect than the other? This is just out of personal curiosity and probably doesn’t really have any significance in regards to psychological literature so I’m unsure if this idea would be the best to look at.
My final idea is to look at whether the rating of the tempo of the music affected the speed at which the participants completed the Dot Task. I’m not too sure whether this would be a good idea to look at either, as the authors noted that participants who completed the task faster were more likely to have made more dishonest decisions, so there are a few confounds at play. This idea might actually be looking at whether music that is perceived to be faster is more inclined to make participants cheat.
What are the goals for next week?
The goal for next week is to work on the exploratory analyses. I aim to finish 1 every 2 days next week in order to finish the report on time. Staying focused on uni work has been really difficult for me lately so I aim to gain some motivation from my group members in getting the report done.