"Although this was the project I scored the least on, I would say it was the most rewarding project I have done during my master's degree."
This project was a deep dive into experimental design. Unlike my other work where I had prior experience, here I had to learn everything from scratch—from validity concepts to ethical considerations. The goal was to learn how to increase the validity of experiments and conduct them ethically in the context of applied cognitive science.
I decided to work on societal and cultural impacts on digital habits. The final product was a comprehensive research proposal that served as the culmination of everything I learned.
The process involved:
Validity involved understanding how to generalise experiments and make sure we were actually measuring what we wanted to measure. It included internal, external, and statistical validity.
Ethics involved learning the principles of conducting ethical research, the IRB process, and why it matters. We discussed historical cases where ethics failed and how those shaped modern research practices.
Covered how to assign participants randomly and select suitable designs. I used a within-subjects design, dividing participants into two groups with imposters in each to test the manipulations effectively.
Focused on designing studies without full randomisation but still aiming to find causal relationships. It focused on using control or comparison groups and managing real-world constraints.
Identifying what's already known, what's missing, and where my study fits in. I dived deep into the areas of social influence research, social structures, cultural influences and theories.
Handling real challenges in the study — like recruitment, scheduling, and consistency — while keeping the design realistic within time and resource limits.