Lit Review & Update

Up to 262 completed surveys! Excellent.

Most of my respondents are white and female, so if you know of any one who is not white or not female, could you encourage them to take the survey. (http://www.gotthink.com/survey/) Thanks!

Working on the Lit Review. Going well. Have a deadline in two weeks. Want to get it done sooner than that.

Oh, and if you haven't already, please take the survey: http://www.gotthink.com/survey/

Update

238 responses! Excellent.

I still want more, many more! Muwa ha ha.

Wow!

It's been 24 hours since my survey started and I have 175 completed responses. That is great! Very excited about that.

Have you taken the survey yet? If not please do!

Excellent!

I've had 87 completes so far for the survey. I think that's awesome!

I am glad that I put in a question about "anything to add". I've made a tweak to a demographics question to make it clearer to other respondents.

If you haven't already, please take the survey! Details here!

Take the Survey!

Here is the obligatory spiel. Please take the survey!

As you might know I am a Sociology and Mathematics student from the University of Southern Maine. I am conducting an anonymous survey about happiness and subjective well-being with adults 18 years or older.

Would take the survey and also help me spread the word? The survey is located here: http://www.gotthink.com/survey/

This anonymous, online survey is voluntary and will take 5-10 minutes to complete. It will be open until Thursday, March 26th, 2009.

There are no known benefits to participating in this survey; nor are there any known risks for participating in this survey.

As a special incentive, those who complete this survey have an opportunity to participate in a sweepstakes for one of two $25 Amazon.com gift certificates. Those who wish to participate, when they complete the survey will be given an option to go to a separate survey that will collect their email address. Winners will be informed via email when the data collection is completed, on Thursday, March 26th, 2009.

Thank you.

Click Here to Take this Survey

If you have any questions, please contact me (Lanna) at happywellbeing@gmail.com.

Faculty Supervisor: Professor Ed Collom. Contact information: (207) 228-8385 or collom@usm.maine.edu

If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject, you may contact: Director, Office of Research Compliance, USM at (207)780-4517, or usmirb@usm.maine.edu, or TTY (207)780-5646.

Not much to say, but that will change soon

Haven't posted in a while. Been reading and getting ready for the launch of the survey (yeah!) which will go up very soon. Finally, it's time!

Another Update

I just finished a draft for my IRB proposal. I angsted over it for the last three weeks! So glad to have it in a semi-complete form.

Part of my problem is that my thoughts have not completely jelled yet. But, I am also under a bit of a deadline - it takes more than two weeks for approval. Yikes!

I think I can be ready by then.

That's better

Okay. No posts, I have been a bit blocked where this project is concerned, but today marks a turning point, of which I am grateful.

I have some notes that I need to download from my Alphasmart, but I also have a direction.

Of course, this might be easier if I use pre-existing data, but the point is to run a research study from beginning to end, to design a survey, administer it, then analyze data and present findings.

Have written about half of the survey and still working on reading through some articles. I think I found what I needed to explain the importance of why to study happiness, or how I will explain it anyway.

Update

Not thinking very happy thoughts right now. Have been working a lot, and not been able to devote any time to my research. If my regular school-time schedule is any indication, I will get caught up over the weekend.

Regarding the book Flow, I think the intro might be good for a couple of quotes but I am not sure the thrust of the book fits what I want to do: an quantitative sociological survey. Will try to read some more, but I am not holding out much hope.

On the upside, I did get my other books from Amazon today. And I might see if I can borrow a couple of books from work.

Brain Dump

Keep thinking about stuff like, what is happiness? How do you measure happiness? Can you measure happiness? Should you measure happiness?

I think I read an article about Nazism and happiness during Intro to Sociology. We (I) think that happiness is inherently good. But people who do bad things are happy too (maybe they are always happy). Of course, it depends on whether you thing you are doing something bad or not. (Trying to remember to keep things simple, but it's so hard!)

How do autonomy and agency contribute to happiness? I know that I am much happier not being an assistant any longer (for my day job.) I think that those with more autonomy would be happier than those with less. (Of course, that might just be a no brainer...)

One of the reasons I decided to do my research notes as a blog was that it would make me happy. I like creating blogs, and I like trying to engage others. That said, if only my husband ends up reading this (and then, only if I specifically ask him to) that's okay too.

As I said in a previous post, I really have to buckle down for the next couple of weeks so I can get ready to do my survey in February--all research involving subjects must be approved by USM's Institutional Review Board, so I need to get everything ready for submission. (heh, heh, submission.)

My goal for this blog is to post every day. Well, I don't think that's going to happen, if my other blogs are any comparison, but if I post at least 5 days per week, I'll be happy. (There it is, happy again. I'll never get away from it!).