Home > Research Tools

Updated July 2006

Recruitment

When running experiments it is important to have an easy way to schedule meetings, make appointments for subjects, arrange coverage times, track appointments, etc. There are two excellent free tools from Google that can go a long way toward making these activities run smoothly. I highly recommend Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets.

You will first need to sign up for a free account with Google. You can do so by following this link: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

Google Calendar: The calendar can be shared among members of the research team and all members can access the calendar from the web.  Use the calendar to display when team members are available and the times for subject appointments. To maintain confidentiality, do not include identifying information about research participants. http://www.google.com/calendar

Google Spreadsheet: This online spreadsheet is an enormously useful tool for keeping track of data collection activities.  Columns can be set up listing who ran the subject, any data collection issues that came up, whether data has been entered in the database, etc; whatever you need to track.  The advantage over using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is that all researchers can view and modify the most updated spreadsheet over the web. http://spreadsheets.google.com However, I would not recommend the spreadsheet for keeping track of the data itself or for any information that would be identifying.

Data Entry

When I was a staff psychologist at the Menninger Clinic Child and Family Center I learned a neat trick about managing datasets.  We were fortunate to have on staff a database management expert and a statistical consultant and they had several good ideas about collecting data across multiple projects. One of the most useful lessons involved using Microsoft Access for data management.

Microsoft Access, a relational database that is included with most Microsoft Office installations, offers many advantages over entering data directly into a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program.  Although Access has a fairly steep learning curve, once the data is entered it is simple to export the data into an Excel file that can be read by SPSS.  In Access, a separate table is created for each of the tests we administer, and they are all linked by the subject ID to the participant’s demographic information. The person entering data sees a form with tabs across the top for each test. Clicking on a tab takes one to a form that allows for data entry specific to that test.  Note that in Access the variables are named “fields” and can store numbers, text excerpts, and longer pieces of data such as whole stories (such as TAT stories). Let’s say five projects are being run using a data set, each with samples differing in demographic criteria and utilizing tests with different exclusion criteria. Simply set up queries in the database that allow demographic and test data for each project to be pulled out into separate tables that can be exported into SPSS for analysis.  One minor downside is that while variable names (e.g., gender) are easily exported, their does not seem to be a way to bring value labels into SPSS from Access (e.g., 1 = male; 2 = female). 

Using Access with repeated measure designs. If you will be administering the same measure to subjects on several occasions, be sure you create a separate field for each datapoint as SPSS will require the data from each subject to be on one row. For example, if you were administering the same IQ test 3 times, you would need 9 variables: Verbal1 Performance1 FullScale1, Verbal2 Performance2 FullScale2, Verbal3 Performance3 FullScale3. As mentioned above, a tabbed form can be used for each test administered. For tests administered several times, consider another tabbed form, with each tab showing one time interval. For example, on the tabbed form WAIS-III, the tabbed subform would have three tabs: Pretest, Posttest, and Follow-Up, each showing the fields for the scores obtained at that time.

Narrative and Story Data Coding

For researchers working with narrative, interview, or story data, such as TAT stories, once the data is typed into Microsoft Access memo fields (or pasted from a Microsoft Word document into Access), the narrative data can easily be displayed as “reports” and printed for data coding purposes. For example, with the TAT data in the database, it takes only a few minutes to create a query that would print TAT Cards 2, 12M, and 3BM for a set of subjects that meet specified criteria, one card per page, with a seven-digit ID number on each page.

Rick Holigrocki, Ph.D. 2006