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.

Keep it Simple

For the past 5 or so weeks, my partner and I have been developing a research project about health care literacy. We've submitted documents for our problem statement, literature search review, and even theoretical framework. But now, after all that work, we have determined that in order to correlate this class research project with the big research project about Web 2.0 tools, we pretty much need to revamp everything. So, the new (hopefully final) topic for this project is going to be factors influencing use of Web 2.0 tools for health care purposes. We will still look at different variables such as age, income, race, and educational status.

This is the first research class I've ever taken. And now that I actually understand what is required of me, things seem to be falling in place a little better now. I've already redone our problem statement and the search strategy. Lesson learned for this week....just when you think you have it all figured out, maybe you really don't!

Now, as far as the big research study I will be involved in....that's supposed to be launched pretty soon. I thought it was going to start today, but I never heard anything else out of the research team. So, we will start getting people to complete the survey as soon as they let me know everything is good to go. It will be interesting to determine what factors really do influence not only use of Web 2.0 for health care, but for educational and personal reasons as well.

All Over the Place

There are so many different ways we could go with this research project we're doing for school. So, for right now, the idea is to compare/correlate the factors influencing healthcare literacy and the factors influencing the use of digital technology. Since the research question is due tomorrow, hopefully all of this will fall into place really soon.

As far as the Web 2.0 research study is going...we weren't able to meet last week, which was just as well for me. I believe we should be just about ready to get this show on the road. I think they've got everything in order with grant applications and all...all of that stuff you have to do when you're doing a research project. Which reminds me, if we're going to present our research project at the GC&SU Student Research Conference, we've gotta get all of our paperwork and all ready as well. I've really got to get busy with all of my school work. I always feel like I'm so behind, but I guess that's pretty normal from what I hear.

There's also been a lot going on in my personal life lately as well. I just had to have surgery to have my gallbladder removed this past Thursday, so I'm also having to deal with the pain and lifestyle/diet changes required. Wow...life sure does throw some curve balls at us sometimes. I'll try to keep my head on my shoulders and my head out of the clouds...for now at least. My faith in the Lord will help me make it through all of this!

Research Project for Class

As previously mentioned, I'm also taking a graduate nursing research class this semester. We have to do a research project/proposal for this class. I will be doing this research project with help from one other student in my class. I knew that I wanted to work on something that would correlate with the Healthcare 2.0 Research Study. At first, I was attempting to come up with a whole new research study, but that didn't seem to be working. After turning in our first and second drafts of the problem statement, we still received a reply of "what's your problem?" With a little help from Dr. Bondal, I now have a better idea of my project idea and problem statement for our project. I chose variables from the survey for the research study, including age, gender, location, and income. I would like to study whether any of these factors (independent variables) would have any influence on use of electronic devices (dependent variable). Lesson learned: components of a problem statement and the real difference between independent and dependent variables. This week I finally figured out which direction to go with this research project!