Throughout the month of October, I spent a large amount of time performing some last-minute data collections! The original outline for this project was that I would conclude data collections on September 30th. After realizing how close I was to reaching my minimum goal of 50 participants, Dr. Young and I requested to extend the data collection period through October 13th. This gave us an extra two-week extension to hopefully meet our goal!
The entire process of data collection would not have been as successful as it was without the help from Dr. Young and my awesome research assistants, Kam Yerga and Arianna Ray! They assisted me in acquiring the data throughout the entire month and they were even able to take the lead on gathering data on the last day. On this day, I had roughly 10 participants scheduled to take part in the study. I knew that these numbers would have us exceeding our goal of 50 subjects. Unfortunately, I suffered from my own injury and found myself at urgent care with a grade 2 ankle sprain. I was unable to be present for the final data collections, and I thought that I would have to cancel the collections for the day. Kam and Arianna notified me that they were willing to take the initiative to collect the last of the data. They insisted that I had taught them well enough to do it on their own, and they most definitely succeeded at the task. Kam and Arianna’s lead allowed us to conclude the study with a total of 52 participants! Now that we have all of our data, I have begun the process of analyzing the videos and pulling all the pieces together from the surveys. I needed to convert the videos into a file that ImageJ would read so that I can proceed with analyzing the footage. I ran into some issues when converting the videos, but Dr. Bentley, the Physics Program Director and Associate Professor, was able to help. He created a program that would allow me to convert my videos into several frames that can be read when put into ImageJ. As of now, I am still in the process of converting all of the files over through this program. In addition, I am currently working on sorting through all of the information in the surveys that were completed by the participants. Overall, everything seems to be coming together and I have begun drafting the beginning of my paper. I am excited to see what happens next! Since my last blog post went up on the website, I have been busy working on the analyses of my project. I used the program of Mesquite to take the data that Dr. Young collected and calculate independent contrasts for just the Emydid taxa. There was some trouble at first for figuring out how to calculate the independent contrasts, but after the third try (third times the charm!) I was able to calculate the values I was looking for.
With these independent contrasts, it was time to calculate statistical values of an OLS regression like r-squared, t, and the slope of the line. I tried using the computer program SPSS at first since I am most familiar with it, but after a few unsuccessful attempts, I decided to use RStudio. Since I am not familiar with this software and have never used it before, I have been teaching myself R code for the past week and so far, I have been pretty successful with getting the results I am looking for. For the next few weeks, I am aiming on finishing up these statistical calculations and moving on in my project to seeing if differences do exist in the limb bone morphology between the Emydid turtles. I also hope to have the rough draft of my manuscript completed within the next few weeks once all of my analyses are finished. After this is completed, I will be well on my way to finishing up the final touches and completing my project! |
AuthorsAlok Agwick Archives
February 2024
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