As I started doing my research on Tuesday, I had six days to think about what I was observing and decided that I needed to add some different areas to my observations. Since I only had one day of the other observations, with just a few areas gone, I don’t know if I should keep it or just throw it out and start with my data collection from yesterday (October 19th). I also keep thinking of different things to observe, but if I have a checklist or template, it seems like I’ll keep adding to it and then I won’t have the same data to compare. In my mind, I think every time I think of something new, I should throw out my old data, but then I would be left with nothing. I feel like I’m doing a good job during my observations, it’s just hard for me to be confident that I’m getting good information. It makes me nervous, because what if I get to the end and all my data is useless, that will not be a good thing.
I will start my first end of the week survey with a couple written questions on Friday (October 23rd) and do these at the end of each week, to see if scores increase or decrease throughout the course of the project. I will also start my focus groups next Friday (October 30th). I am still deciding on questions for this first one. I will have a total of two, one next week after two weeks of the project and one after the fifth week (or fourth, I can’t remember how long we are supposed to collect data for).