Great Progress in Research Study Phase 1!

Thanks for your interest in the progress of the Engineering CAReS research study! We are trying to find out what the technical workplace feels like to those who work there, so that we can provide solutions to make it better for everyone.  If you are curious about this project, check out this early blog post for an introduction.

      Status Update 

Completed surveys continue to come in, and we are excited to be approaching our goal for Phase 1.  If you have already completed a survey, then thank you! If not, would you consider joining us? The survey can now be found at: 

https://forms.office.com/r/X12q7D3dH5

The survey must be completed before you close your browser.

Some Exciting Early Results...

If you have been keeping track, you might notice that our target has changed from 360 to 200 surveys for Phase 1. What's going on?

Well, it is very good news! We have preliminary results from the 155 completed surveys that indicate we can complete the necessary Phase 1 statistical analysis with fewer surveys. Why is that? Because the data is very good! What do we mean by that?

Well, we are learning that the questions you answered on the survey are very self-consistent. This means that we will be able to remove many of the questions on the Phase 1 survey, and still get reliable and valid results. 

Are you wondering how this works? Well, when researchers study people, we often want to measure an abstract concept, such as a person's "sense of belonging" in their workplace, or how much a person feels that their workplace supports (or hinders) their professional development. We do this by constructing measurement scales, which are a list of questions that each person who completes the questions seems to always answer in a similar way. We try to reduce an overall survey to the minimum number of questions that can reliably measure a particular concept of interest.

For example, suppose we want to know an individual's tendency to like eating sweet foods. We might, in Phase 1, ask these questions:

For each food listed below, indicate how often you would choose to eat it if you could (Answer 1 = never or not at all, 2 = once in a while, 3 = sometimes, 4 = often, 5 = any chance I get):

1. Ice cream
2. Birthday cake
3. Chocolate chip cookies
4. Hard candy
5. Chocolate truffles
6. Marshmallows
7. Apple pie
8. Pecan pie
9. Jello
10. Banana bread

If we have many people answer this question, we are looking for a set of questions that any one individual will tend to answer not the same, but similarly.  If we find that the answer to "jello" has no correlation to the answer for other foods, then we would eliminate it on future surveys, because it does not seem to measure the same concept of "like to eat sweet foods." If any one person will give a similar number answer to all the other 9 foods, then we have some confidence that they all measure the same thing. In that case, we could ask fewer questions. If we only asked about ice cream, birthday cake, and chocolate truffles, we would still have a good estimate of how much that one person likes sweet foods. Now, we have a much shorter survey!

And so, back to our survey about the engineering workplace. We have a number of different ideas or concepts that we want to measure. The Phase 1 survey has multiple questions about each concept. From the preliminary data of the first few hundred people, we are starting to find questions that we can eliminate without losing information. 

This Phase 1 "Tool Development" allows both us and other researchers to better understand both engineers themselves and their experiences in the technical workplace. Once we know how to measure the important concepts, then we can collect data from many more people, and then confidently build models to understand what factors are significant to the workplace experience. It will also allow us to identify which groups of people are thriving - or not - as engineers or computer scientists (including those who work closely with them).