Data Collection Woes

Our data collection efforts are not going well.

The last time I recruited for this type of study, we got 18 respondents. This time we got 5. I was aiming for a group of 8, because 6 is perfect and we usually get a couple of people who drop out. Well, we got a couple of people who dropped out, so now we're at 3.

The only thing I can think of that's different this time is that we're running the study in the spring instead of the fall, maybe that makes a difference? Maybe they're more burned out in the spring and less willing to do optional after-school extracurriculars. Also, there's the sickouts and missed school days that happened, so school has been highly disrupted.

And now we got notice that school will be extended by 12 minutes every day starting on Monday, through the end of the year (to make up for days the district had to close due to teacher sickouts). Will the late bus then come 12 minutes later? Because if it doesn't, then we'll have almost no time to do our study after school before the bus comes. (IRB requires us to do it after school, so that no instruction time is missed, and requires us to end before the late bus comes.)

So, we're going to re-run 3 studies this summer or fall and this time, because they'll all be repeats at that point, I'm going to have my grad students do the teaching. Our participating school district was excited about meshing this with their summer school program, but they needed to get the times and details to me so that I could get through IRB soon enough. Working with the district is complicated because it adds an additional IRB layer. I have to go through our university's IRB, then get approval, then apply to the district's external research evaluation board (not an official IRB but they act like they are). Once approved by them, I have to resubmit to our university's IRB showing official approval from the district. Then I have to resubmit to the district showing final university approval. Only then is any study approved. This process takes a few months because there are always changes/modifications to make. Anyway, the district personnel have not gotten back to me with the details I need, which means I now am going to miss the deadline for the district's external research board to do work in the summer with them.

So I can't run these studies through the district this summer, basically because for weeks and weeks I haven't been able to get people to return my calls or emails to get the details I need.

I know this is not personal, because everybody is basically AWOL at the district right now. The budget issues, the dismantling of their unions, the coming layoffs, the sick-outs, the protests, and the talk and preparation for a general strike...well, everything is chaos at the district. Nothing is getting done and I'm sure that getting some random researcher the details she needs is low on everybody's priority list.

So I will try to run the study through the university's middle school program for students of color and 1st generation college students, and we'll see how that goes. It is frustrating to not have all of this tied up, and it is frustrating that my current data collection efforts are suffering from low numbers and encroaches on our time. It remains to be seen whether I'll get anything publishable out of this.

The one bright side of all of these data collection woes is this: it doesn't matter for tenure. Anything I were to publish out of the current study would never get submitted until after my tenure decision regardless of the quality of the data. (It just takes that long to analyze and write up the results from a study like this.) So getting bad data right now, or unusable data, is a bummer but it's not a career killer. If this had been happening 2 years ago I would have been totally freaking out about how this would have destroyed my tenure chances. It's kind of nice to not have to worry about that, at least.