While testing my third group of participants this week, I realized that I’ve gotten a lot better at this over time! After my first session, I learned to be more cheerful with participants in order to make them feel more comfortable in the space. And after my second session, I learned to speak much more explicitly about what I was doing. Before, I would talk while trying to do other things (like copying and pasting links in the Zoom chat for participants). This made my voice trail off in a way that made my instructions very hard to follow, and which made me seem sort of disengaged. So during my last session I tried much harder to take a pause to explain what I was doing before doing it. I also made sure to explain that I was going to switch from speaking English to German before switching so that it wasn’t as jarring for participants.
On the whole I can tell that I have greatly improved in my skill at running participants, which makes perfect sense, since all things take practice. But because of this, I do still have areas for improvement. For example, I still don’t entirely know how to send participants off to start the discussion task. I’ve adopted “Have fun/Viel Spass” but I still “leave” (as in turn off my Zoom microphone and camera) the Zoom room quite awkwardly. I also have to work on always remembering to start recording the Zoom call. I haven’t forgotten yet, but every time I have a moment of panic, remembering to turn it on only after the call starts (but luckily before anything important happens). I think I may put a large, bolded, underlined, red bit of text reminding myself to turn on recording in my protocol document.
Next week I will test another group of participants, and continue to try and finish coding and transcribing all of the data. We are slowly moving towards analyzing the data, and are going to start looking for interesting patterns or events in the data we have so far. I’m still a bit nervous that we won’t have the richest data with our group sizes, but my advisor seems confident that there’s plenty to look at, so I trust her.
Hi Felicity! It sounds like your research is going really well! I am glad that you were able to adjust your speaking with participants and other aspects of your running to make it more comfortable and easy on participants. That is definitely a challenge with these Zoom calls as you do not have the same gesture and person-to-person interaction as you do in person. In order to get your message across without those means, you have to be more specific and take your time in speaking. That is something that I also realized along the way. I have also adjusted to looking for cues in my participants when I can see that they are confused by an instruction I gave or when they did not hear what I said. This was an adjustment with the online format, but it seems that we are all managing well with it! Good luck with the rest of your research!