I began my practicum on 9/26/2011. So far I have done 25 hours.
At first I began my practuim as job but when speaking with the supervisor she informed me that she had students in the past count the job as a practicum. The job is a survey that is conducted on people who smoke or who have quit smoking and it is a longitudinal study. The responsdents are chosen at random, and must meet qualifications: be 18 years or older, a smoker, and smoke over a 100 cigarettes. However, if the respondant has taken the survey before and has quit the survey is still conducted to see what has made then quit smoking. There are several countires that the survey is being conducted at, the country that I will be calling is Australia. Those invole are Cancer institutes and the Internatinal Tobaco Coalition.
So far I have been in trianing and will begin conducting the actual survey to respondents next week. During training scientific intergity was stress. Espically, reading things word for word and not biasing the study. As well what kind of cigarettes there are ( there's a huge list to chose from), I never knew that so many cigarettes existed! I can't wait to begin the survey to hear what respondents answers will be!
10-20-2011 through 10-22-2011, I worked a total of 18 hours.
This was the first week that the survey went live and we were able to call the respondents to conduct the survey over the phone. It remind me of PSY 201 when we had to put together our own research assignment and then conduct it. The main thing was up holding scientific integity. This is harder to do when your conducting a research over the phone because instead of someone doing a survey on their own you are trusted to fill in the answers that the person picks. Some people except for you to understand what answer choice they choose without them clearly stating it, which I did on my first survey made an error and did. However, that was my first time doing the survey and the first call I made. I was told what I did wrong and how I could fix it for next time, so far I haven'y had anymore mistakes.
Hours: Week ending in 10/1/2011: 16.45, Week ending in 10/8/2011: 8.30, Week ending in 10/22/2011: 16.45, Week ending in 10/29/2011 8, Week ending in 11/5/2011: 18.2, Week ending in 11/12/2011: 13, Week ending in 11/19/2011: 26.00, Week ending in 11/26/2011: 19.30, and week ending in 12/3/2011: 19.39 hours. This gave me a total of 145.09 hours.
The main classes that tied into my practicum were: psychology 201 and 202. Both these classes focus on the proper way to conduct research and how research information could be put to use. I went through a two week training in which scientific integrity was stress! The reason why is because I was calling people in Australia to conduct an over the phone survey and nothing could be bias or the research would be no good. This was kind of difficult in the begging because Australians have accents that you have to become accustom to in order to understand them or you have to ask them to repeat themselves a couple of times before you could get what they were saying. I believe this practicum to be beneficial because you see what it takes to conduct a successful research assignment. To give a better insight into what I was doing my supervisor emailed me a link to share:
http://vimeo.com/8871417
There really wasn’t a lot of information to share because I wasn’t working hands on hands with people and I experience pretty much the same thing every time I worked. While beneficial seeing what research is about, if I had more time I would have tried for something that allowed me to work closer with individuals.
