While designing this study I ran into several difficulties while implementing my sampling strategy. Firstly, I needed to figure out a way to quantify the ‘busyness’ of human activity in the area. I accomplished this by counting the amount of vehicle and human traffic moving past the sampling sites across a 10-minute period. This proved to be much more work than initially anticipated. These sites were much busier than I expected, often recording over 150 vehicles in just 10 minutes.
I plan to continue my sampling in the same way. While it is more work than initially anticipated, it is proving itself by providing valuable data. I may implement the use of more observers to spread out the load evenly.
Hello pgrierson:
I have a few comments and suggestions regarding your hypothesis, which I hope will be helpful for you:
1. Clarity and Falsifiability: Your hypothesis is clear. but it could be more falsifiable. Could you possibly rephrase it in a way that it can be easily tested and potentially disproven by your study or future studies?
2. Clear Statements and Patterns: While you’ve outlined your study focus well, it might help to delve a bit deeper into the specific patterns you’re looking at.
3. Measurability in Field Settings: Your predictor and response variables are easily measurable in a field setting. However, it might benefit your study if you can make sure your counts minimize errors, e.g., use video recordings and then slow play the counts (traffic can be heavy at some times, which can make field surveys difficult)
4. Potential Confounding Variables: I noticed that you didn’t mention specific potentially confounding variables in your blog post. Given that field research is seldom clean-cut, could there be factors like “some variables other than pedestrian and vehicular traffic flow” that could affect your results?
I am looking forward to seeing how your study progresses!
Best wishes,
Jiabei Zhao