IS4800 – Empirical Research Methods in Information Science

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Team Projects

The following assignments are to be completed by teams. Team project reports should be emailed to is4800@ccs.neu.edu by 11am on the due date. In-class presentations should be prepared using PowerPoint or your web technology of choice and either: a) emailed to is4800@ccs.neu.edu by 11am on the due date (please put PRESENTATION in the subject line); b) put on a USB memory stick for use on the instructor’s laptop; or c) put on your own laptop that you bring to class for the presentation. DO NOT ASSUME THERE IS INTERNET CONNECTIVITY IN THE CLASSROOM.

General

Each project has a two week duration. Study proposals are due 3 class sessions before deadline (you may submit early), and must be at least two pages long (except for the first proposal which only needs to be one page long). You may not collect data until the instructor sends you an email explicitly approving your study protocol. Data collection, analysis, writeup and preparation for oral presentation are due on the due date (see the directory page for team assignments, presenter assignments and due dates). Your projects must be related in some way to IS, and follow the Northeastern IRB guidelines for student projects discussed in class. Your final reports must be at least two pages long and contain both raw data, visualizations, analysis (statistics), and discussion (interpretation & implications). At the completion of each project you will be asked to evaluate yourself and your teammates.

Presentations

Oral presentations must be at most 12 minutes in length (hard upper bound - you will be cut off if you go over), leaving 3 minutes critique per team. Your talk should encompass the main idea/research question, hypotheses (if appropriate), study design, results, conclusions, and (very important) appropriate visualizations of your results. Either email your ppt to is4800@ccs.neu.edu by 11am, or bring a memory stick with ppt (test your ppt on a friend’s computer to make sure there are no embarassing delays, which will count against your allotted time). If you are using our computers, make sure your presentation is compatible with PowerPoint 2007 or IE7 without special plugins. You can also present off of your laptop, but you must test your laptop with the classroom projector prior to the start of class.

Tips for a good presentation:

• Lots of visuals - ideally little or no narrative text. Your charts should be artifacts that you are presenting and talking about (it's OK to have notes).
• What research question were you addressing?
• What was your study design?
• What was your protocol?
• Who were your participants?
• What were your measures?
• What data did you collect? (Use visualizations like bar charts, pie charts, etc. as appropriate to summarize your data.)
• What were the characteristics of your distributions?
• What analyses did you conduct?
  • Did you do any subgroup analyses?
• What are your conclusions?
• What are the implications?

Example Presentations from Past Classes [descriptive1] [descriptive2] [correlational1] [correlational2]

T1	Team Study #1 - Ethnographic/Descriptive The first study should be ethnographic and/or descriptive. Proposals are due 3/11, giving you one week to conduct, writeup and present your results on 3/18. Priorities: Motivation, Methodology, Form of writeup & presentation, Conclusions/Lessons learned.
T2	Team Study #2 - Correlational / Quasi-Experimental The second study should be correlational, with proposals due on 3/22 and presentations on 4/1.
T3	Team Study #3 - Experimental The third study should be experimental, with proposals due on 4/8 and presentations on 4/19.