The curse of the monolithic consent agreement

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:04 PM, David Randolph wrote:

Dear Barbara:

I think 45 minutes is a pretty fair estimate [for the full-blown v4 survey]. Yes, they can do it in more than one session if they use the same browser. (I should highlight this to the recruitment email.) Ivana did it with a big extra fingering exercise in about an hour total, across two sessions. She would probably do what remains in the current survey in 40 minutes.

If this is a major concern, we could split this into two parts--the player profile (10-15 minutes) and the fingering exercises (25-30 minutes) and give away a gift card for each part. But this adds complexity to keeping the pieces together, and I really need both parts.

Will we lose more people to attrition between part 1 and part 2 than we scare off with the 45 minute estimate? That is the big question. There is some value to fingering data without the player profile, I suppose.

And would this imply another run through the IRB gauntlet?

The more I think about it now, the more I think it might be worth it.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Dave

On 8/6/15 1:25 PM, David Randolph wrote:

Dear Barbara:

Another problem has occurred to me. Doling out $50 for each set of two scores is going to deplete our funds pretty rapidly. Ideally (?), we would have each of say, ten pieces, fingered by five different pianists (preferably with a range of hand sizes). This would cost 5 x 5 x $50 = $1250. After the $200 we now plan to spend on the initial surveys, we are $50 over budget, and we have nothing to pay anyone for on-campus visits and whiz-bang computer-vision experiments, which I am still pretty keen to do.

So the other change I would make is for all online activities (not just the required ones) to use lotteries for incentives. If we simply treat each of the five (most well-known to our survey respondents) pieces as separate $100 lotteries, we are covered for $500 + $200 = $700. And we still have $700 to play with. This sounds like a better approach than what I have in the consent form right now.

I am going to lock the current survey. I only have one response so far (from someone I don't know actually--I think my sister-in-law forwarded the link). We should meet soon to strategize.

Thanks,

Dave

And finally. . . .

Dear Barbara:

Yes, please hold off until we get our story straight.

I have closed the survey I sent out. I can reopen it if we decide to press on. But I think changes are in order.

I am creating alternate surveys in Qualtrics now. The protocol changes I have in mind should be pretty minor, but should improve our response rate and bang for buck. I think it is worth the extra hassle.

The idea now is to start with the (25-30 minute) fingering exercises and then do the (10-15 minute) profile questions. It might help response rates if we did it in the other order (and ease them into our clutches). But you had recommended doing the data collection first to eliminate any prejudice the questions might exert on the fingerings. So there is a trade-off to consider. Separating the questioning from the annotation in time probably makes me lean more toward starting with the shorter questioning part.

I am still worried about attrition between the two surveys, to be sure. But this seems like our best guess at an optimal approach.

Thanks,

Dave