one step at a time

so the guy from the irb wrote a message this morning and apologized for yesterday's mistake after i sent him an email saying "YOU are waiting?? I have been waiting for YOU!" ... and said i could go ahead and send the letters to the schools but NOT collect anything yet until they had all the letters of the schools' irbs. yeah, that'll be fun! anyway, i went to their office and got their approval letter because i didn't want them to send it through campus mail and all...

margie also wrote back and said i should do the pilot in other schools than the one i want to do the real study with. i found a $200 delta voucher that i need to use before july 15 or something, and it's too late to use it for my trip to paris, that was dumb, i have NO idea how/when/why i got that voucher, probably when i went to utah last spring or something like that, gosh i can't remember where i went, and got stuck in cincinnati for 8 hours... oh, i know, syracuse! iawe conference! what a nightmare! that's probably when i got it, and completely forgot about it until i found it a few days ago. i could've used it for my christmas trip, for the conference trips, or for this summer's paris trip... oh well, i guess i'll have to find a fun place to do my pilot and take that as an excuse to go somewhere this summer!

so about the pilot, the psyc guys told me 40-50 people minimum, to be able to calculate at least a good crombach alpha for the questions, not even enough to do a factor analysis but i guess i'll do that with the final data... but margie doesn't think i need that many people. i don't think i can find 40-50 students in one iep. not sure what i'll do, i guess i'll have to go against margie's opinion if i want my questionnaire to be somehow reliable... if i go to the school where i do the pilot, it'll be nice to see how things go, what people say, what problems arise, and to get direct feedback from the participants. i could even interview some students... that's an idea...

eliminated some questions and got from 70 to 49. not bad! i don't know if i can/want to get fewer than that... i know what margie will say, all of the questions within their constructs are asking the same thing, but it's THE POINT! anyway... haven't heard back from the psyc guys on that one yet. and i have only 1 chapter left to read in the book i want to review. haha, the real work will begin soon!! oh yeah, and i did send the ET article last night! say a little prayer...

tomorrow and thursday all day: final law paper!!!