At long last, we are done "piloting" our materials for the interviews. I conducted two interviews yesterday at GHS - real deal. A sad commentary that pulling kids out of class for 30 mins means I get many more volunteers then an offer of lunch! (DP - the teachers says - so long as their brains are engaged in some hard thinking, he's fine with me pulling people out of class). In any case, two kind souls R and J agreed to come.
R was quick - and organized all the information in a sectioned fashion. Kind of hierarchical but not strictly organized in the nested table fashion that we are thinking of. He created a partitioning of the space by categorical variables that were "above" the vehicle in some sense and then proceeded to code the vehicle type and speed together for all vehicles. He then did a second pass through both segments and added the information about the distance from the preceding vehicle. He had some way to answer all questions but did not go so far as to set up a two way correlation for the last two questions. The flat data structure for him appeared to be more organized and "detailed" - not that he had missing values but the information was "clearer" he said.
J favoured words over numbers. "I like to describe in words rather in numbers" - his own words. The recording took longer mainly because he was narrating the information and needed more time to write it all out. He initially made the mistake of not recording the vehicle type and recorded all the vehicles as cars. Since the rest of his information was complete, I hazard that this had more to do with our colloquial tendency to refer to any vehicle as a "car", than it had to do with considering an attribute unimportant. This meant that he was unable to answer two of the questions. He went back and fixed this information. Then, he was able to answer the questions that he had missed the first time around. The flat structure for J was more messy and insisted that his was easier to read. But did acknowledge that if you like numbers more then it was a better structure.
Spots that glow:
R was quick - and organized all the information in a sectioned fashion. Kind of hierarchical but not strictly organized in the nested table fashion that we are thinking of. He created a partitioning of the space by categorical variables that were "above" the vehicle in some sense and then proceeded to code the vehicle type and speed together for all vehicles. He then did a second pass through both segments and added the information about the distance from the preceding vehicle. He had some way to answer all questions but did not go so far as to set up a two way correlation for the last two questions. The flat data structure for him appeared to be more organized and "detailed" - not that he had missing values but the information was "clearer" he said.
J favoured words over numbers. "I like to describe in words rather in numbers" - his own words. The recording took longer mainly because he was narrating the information and needed more time to write it all out. He initially made the mistake of not recording the vehicle type and recorded all the vehicles as cars. Since the rest of his information was complete, I hazard that this had more to do with our colloquial tendency to refer to any vehicle as a "car", than it had to do with considering an attribute unimportant. This meant that he was unable to answer two of the questions. He went back and fixed this information. Then, he was able to answer the questions that he had missed the first time around. The flat structure for J was more messy and insisted that his was easier to read. But did acknowledge that if you like numbers more then it was a better structure.
Spots that glow:
- Both had a case-centric view of data. They kept the attributes for a case together - even in J's narrative style.
- BF's fear that we are now going to get flat tabular structures is unfounded at least for this small sample
- Protocol was easier to administer this time - had reasonable success with "talk out aloud". So maybe the warmup problems help? Not sure...
- In any case, the task is definitely clear now.
