The Trending Prof

Anita Woods Ph.D., University Educator

No data? No problem.

What to do? None of your experiments are working or you are waiting on ethics approval so you haven’t even begun.  Well my friend, get creative and start a new line of research.

As graduate students, we would lament about the lack of data and the depressing thought that we would never graduate and never get a job.  Then we would fascinate about creating an entirely separate thesis through random experiments (but still properly designed, with well defined parameters and of course, use the right stats to analyze our data).  Fun? Oh yeah.

Example:

photoFuzzy peaches were selected as the control candy based on the average participant likability scale with an average extinction time of 6 hours.  Clearly, Nibs are the most commonly loved candy (1 hour extinction time) while black licorice is the candy for the desperate….but it still eventually disappears in approximately 10 hours.  Although there was a trend for a quicker removal of chocolate covered almonds, there was large variability between trials and therefore this data is not significantly different than the control.

 

No data? No problem.

*These experiments were performed with graduate students, a large pool of subjects eager to participate in experiments involving food.

 

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