This summer I have been working on a project that will test the validity of a social psychological theory in measuring human moral judgment. To facilitate my research project, I began by constructing a survey that was posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk to pilot the test. My survey presented participants with moral transgressions, where they were asked to rate the stimulus on a scale from -5 (Extremely morally wrong) to +5 (Extremely morally right) on how morally wrong or right they find the action. Through the course of my fellowship, I learned a lot about what makes a strong online survey and areas that need to be carefully considered when collecting data through online surveys. This experience taught me a lot, not only about methods, survey design, and online data collection, but also about time management, flexibility in project planning, and how to respond to unexpected challenges and hurdles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next few weeks, I plan to turn my attention to practicing other important skills for facilitating digital scholarship. Firstly, I plan to find creative and compelling ways to visualize my data to best share my research findings. This is a skill that I believe will assist my research presentation now, but also be critical to my success in research throughout my career. I also want to spend time creating a narrative for my research that can be shared with specialists and non-specialists, alike. This has been one of the bigger challenges of the current project because the theory that I am testing is very complicated and not intuitive to understand. This is the most technical project I have completed in my career, so far. In trying to explain my project to others, I have struggled to communicate effectively. I believe that through compelling data visualization and reflecting on presentation and communication, the presentation for the fellowship will allow me to practice these very important skills of research communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, the studio fellowship has been a great opportunity to practice skills that will be crucial for me as I continue my career. In the future I plan to present this work at the American Sociological Association conference in late August. The dedicated research time and presentation practice will go a long way in my being ready for the presentation. After this, I plan to adapt this work into my Master\u2019s Thesis and hopefully into a published academic paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n