Moving Forward with Phase 1

We are making steady progress toward the Phase 1 research study participation goal.

Phase 1 requires a few hundred people so that we can have results with statistical significance. So what will we do after we reach that goal?

First, we will determine which questions from the Phase 1 survey we can eliminate without losing information. When social scientists want to measure an abstract concept by asking the person involved, it is often necessary to ask the questions in several different ways. This rephrasing might make the concept clearer to the person being queried. Or the additional questions, when used together, might capture the concept more fully. Whichever the case, the job for statistics is to consider a series of related questions and determine which are the fewest ones that will reliably (and reproducibly) measure that abstract idea. 

Our Phase 1 survey is attempting to measure a number of abstract concepts. We may discover that some of these just aren't relevant to the issues of belonging in engineering workplaces. We will drop those altogether. We will likely discover that some of the abstract concepts can be measured with, say, only 2 or 3 questions instead of 8 or 9. For either case, the result will be a good thing: a much shorter survey for Phase 2.  

But the data from Phase 1 is still important in and of itself. With just a few hundred engineers sharing their experiences, we will also begin to analyze that data and report results that can be statistically supported as being meaningful.

That will be the beginning of the exciting part of the project! We can start to answer some of the questions that prompted our study. Who feels like they belong in the technial workplace? Who doesn't, and why? What is it about a workplace environment that makes it easier or harder to feel belonging? How common is it to (or isn't it) to feel a sense of belonging as a working engineer or computer scientist?

Want to be a part of it all? Take the survey!

https://forms.office.com/r/X12q7D3dH

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