The Talk with Voluntary Participation of a Project - Assignment Example

Lab #5Reflection PaperDetails of the participantsParticipantAgeSexRecognition test1A24Male102B22Male103C21Female094D27Male08I met participants of this study in four separate occasions. All of them were non relative neighbors and they were visited in the weekend. First I had a friendly chat with participants to reduce their tension. Then participants were explained about the experiment and their signatures were taken for the informed consent. They understood the instructions and it was not difficult to deal with them since they were young and supportive.

However they did not want to read the consent and other instructions therefore those were explained by me. Two of them questioned (in friendly manner) why do they need to sign the consent for this small test. I explained them it has to be done according to the procedure to avoid problems in complicated studies. They were given the list of words first and allowed to study it. It took about 2-5 minutes to study the list. Then they were given the distracter math quiz and recognition test thereafter.

All participants were keen to answer the math quiz. At the end of the test they wanted to know how many answers were correct. In Recognition test participants were asked to circle the words that they have seen in the word list prior to the math quiz. Two participants requested further explanation about the procedure and I explained them. One subject wanted to read the word list for another time (after math quiz) but he was not permitted to do so. All the participants were confident about the words which were on the memory list and two of them (A and B) correctly circled all words in the list.

Further they confidently gave scores for the words they believed that were in the list. However when they were asked to give scores from 1-5 for each word, that were not in the list they were confused and three of them felt that their early answers were wrong and they have missed more. They were confident about the words in the memory list, but less confident about the words not in the list. They spent comparatively longer time to decide the scores for the words not in the list and for most words they gave scores less than 5.

Only one participant (B) confidently gave 5 marks for the words not in the list and all of his answers were correct.It took approximately 45 to 60 minutes to complete a session with a participant. Since participants wanted to know their results at the end of the each session their scores were calculated and explained. Three of them wanted to spend some time to go through the wrong answers and understand them. Therefore answer papers were given back to them for about 5 to 10 minutes. However the participant A did not want to read the answers again.

Finally I thanked them for their voluntary participation and told them they were very cooperative during the experiment and performed the tests very well. Although it was instructed to debrief the participants at the end of the experiment I felt it was unnecessary because this is a small study in which personal details are not recorded and I have already explained about the study at the beginning. According to my experience this experiment was a success due to friendliness and cooperation of the participants.