For the past couple of weeks, we have been busy trying to recruit informants for our study. Who knew this was going to be such a labour-intensive task? We tried recruiting through social media, as well as asking people in the cafeteria of the media cluster, without any luck. Then, we resorted to using our own, somewhat limited, network of people here in Bergen. This worked out fine, thanks in large part to the two Bergen residents on our team. We have now recruited 10 informants in total, two of them being scheduled for eye-tracking evaluation on Saturday and the last one for a regular interview on Tuesday next week.
The evaluations that we have conducted so far have been going well, and we have received some good insights. Most of the interviews have lasted somewhere around the 20-minute mark. This is pretty far off the 45 minutes we imagined it would take. However, this seems to be a good thing as one of the participants remarked that she was initially intimidated by our estimate of 45 minutes.
The biggest challenge we have faced so far was losing the sound-recording for one of the interviews. This was also the only interview when we didn’t have a backup recorder. Having learned that lesson, we are now going to record on 3 separate devices for tomorrows eye-tracking test. We are not losing another one.
Today, Friday, we checked out the equipment for the evaluation tomorrow. We spent a couple of hours playing around with it and making sure we knew how to operate it properly. We are pretty confident going into this, but because the technology can be quite moody and unreliable we hope everything goes as planned. We have given ourselves one hour tomorrow to get all the equipment up and running before the participants arrive. Fingers crossed.
/Emma, Martine, Simon, Hector & Susanne