Overall, I would say our research is going as I expected it to go so far. Our goal was to get at least thirty people to take the test and I would say we are probably a little less than half of the way there, which is right on track with where we wanted to be at this point. I think we still have plenty of time to conduct more tests and reach thirty fairly soon. As far as our survey is going, we never really set a specific goal for how many we wanted but I would say we have a bit fewer responses in total than we would have liked to at this point. However, we’re not super far behind and we still have enough time to get more people to take it. I think part of the problem has been that I’ve been focusing more on giving the test to people instead of the survey, and that I need to start having people take the survey along with the test. We still have work to do, but as a whole I would say we’re basically at the point in our research that we anticipated to be at right now.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed while conducting our research so far has been that people are more willing to take the test while listening to music than I thought they would. Coming into the project, I didn’t think it would necessarily be hard to get people willing to listen to music while taking it, but I thought some people wouldn’t want to and would prefer to take it normally. But that hasn’t been the case as all of the people that I’ve given the test to so far have been willing to take it while listening to music. This could be due to the fact that the scores on this particular test don’t mean anything to them, so they don’t really care if the music effects their test taking abilities. Nevertheless, I’m still surprised everybody has been so willing to take the test with music.
Don’t be afraid of social media and messaging! Even if you send the survey to 20 people in your contacts a day (and even if not all of them respond) you will be getting a good amount of responses.
It is interesting that people are more willing to listen to music… I wonder if there would have been a difference if you wouldn’t have given them a choice of music, and you picked the music for them.