Update

As of this morning when I spoke with the research team, 80 people have already taken the survey. That's a pretty good number. But, of course we want a lot more! Unfortunately, no post cards were ever made, but we did talk about getting some fliers created. Hopefully those will be ready by the first of next week. I probably need to wrap up with analyzing data for the student research conference the beginning of the following week. That should give me plenty of time to go out into the community next week and collect some more data. I now have to work three 12 hour shifts in a row for the next 3 days. I have been off for 6 days and really NOT ready to go back, but we gotta do what we gotta do. I'll be back after Easter....

....Data Collection Continues

I continue to tell everyone I come into contact with to take the survey. Some people I see will tell me "I haven't had a chance to take that survey yet" and some remind me that they have already submitted their survey. Today, I posted this blog and a link to the survey on my facebook page. I am determined to get this out to everyone I know. I plan on going out into the community this week, maybe to the library, or I thought about handing out post cards at the post office if they would allow me to do that. You see, Dr. Bondal said something about these postcards they had made that had all of the information about the survey and the link and everything. So, I could hand those out in various places and hopefully get a lot more responses to the survey. I will ask Dr. Bondal about them when I call her in the morning. I need to go make sure I have my alarm clock set to go off at 9:30 in the AN reminding me to call in to Dr. Bondal. I think I have missed calling her on time two times this semester already, once cause I forgot and once cause I overslept! Oh, and we were able to work on the proposal for class and the student conference coming up really soon April 16th. My research partner and I met with Dr. Bondal yesterday AM to go over what we had already and get her input on what we should change or how we could make it better. I think she wants it to be perfect or something...haha! Anyways, I better go for now. I have a lot of other school work I need to be working on now......

Spring Break 2010

As you can tell by the title, we're on break from school this week. I haven't gotten a whole lot of feedback from survey takers, but most of the comments I have heard have pretty much all been the same. They tell me that the questions were confusing. One of the nurses at work, one of my really good friends, told me that she felt like a "dummy" because she didn't know what half of that stuff was! I told her that was ok that she didn't know what some of it was, because we wanted to collect all kinds of data. That's what we're trying to figure out: the who, what, when, where, and why people (AKA HC consumers/providers) use Web 2.0. A lot of people say they don't know what most of the words mean, so that makes me wonder if that's what our results are going to prove...that a lot of people don't really use these tools yet. I guess we'll see pretty soon.

......AND WE'RE OFF!

The data collection process has finally begun. The survey has finally been launched. For anybody reading this, I encourage you to participate in our survey to determine how healthcare consumers and healthcare providers use Web tools for personal and healthcare reasons. Evidence suggests that Internet use and technology make healthcare delivery better. The address to the site where you can take the survey is below. I couldn't make it work when I tried to create a link so you could just click on it. When I went to view the blog, the link was missing, just vanished. Anyways, so sorry it's not so convenient but if you could be so kind as to copy and paste in your address bar. And if anybody can tell me how to make it work, I would try to fix it if I knew how.

http://www2.gcsu.edu/irb/health.htm

Today, I sent the survey link via email to 43 people in my address book. I got failure notices returned on 2 of the contacts, so my email ended up going out to 41 people. That was just about everybody in my address book except for the businesses and the addresses for the people in the research group. I sent it to my old boss (a doctor in Warner Robins), my grandparents, my kid's teachers...I mean, everybody! In the email, I encouraged those I emailed to get their spouses (or whoever they want) to take the survey as well. I also emailed everyone in both of my classes to ask them to take the survey as well.

Just as Dr. Bondal said Monday night, I, too, am excited to "crunch numbers" and analyze the data we collect to find out the results. Of course, I have my own ideas and I have expressed those in my hypothesis. I think that younger people, women, better educated, higher income people will be more likely to use Web 2.0 for healthcare reasons. I wonder if we predicted accurately. I wonder how many people out there even use Web tools for healthcare reasons. I use a lot of different Web tools for school now, but until recently (in the past year), I didn't even know what Web 2.0 was. Wow, how much I have learned in such a short time. I think it is absolutely amazing how technology is continuously changing and improving and expanding. It's inspiring to be involved, especially at this stage. To my teachers and the research committee, thanks for this opportunity.