I was expecting that my real-world study participants would find it super interesting to wear all this “fancy” equipment and walk around campus. Throughout the data collection period, however, I had a few participants who started to be concerned about their look once we had finished outfitting them. In these cases, I offered them to […]

Human participants devote their time to our research when they participate in our studies. To me, it is not only an ethical but also a moral obligation to ensure that participants can enjoy their time as much as possible. My real-world study involved palpating participants’ bodies in order to take body measures from them which […]

March 10, 2023 – and the time has finally come: The data collection as part of my online study is complete! A total of more than 200 students from my host university, UC Santa Barbara, participated. My subjects were asked to do a variety of challenging tasks: Not only did they have to indicate where […]

It’s August 18th, 2023 and this is a very important day! I have successfully finished all my data collections at UCSB! This is just-in-time so to speak – I’m scheduled to arrive back at my home university, TU Wien, on Sep 1st, 2023! Taken together the online and in-situ studies I ran while visiting UCSB, […]

This year’s deadline for submitting applications to the MSCA funding scheme is approaching quickly. This funding scheme is, arguably, one of the most competitive and one of the most prestigious schemes the European Union has to offer. Applicants have only 10 pages to present a striking research idea and explain to reviewers why this is […]

In German-speaking countries, they are known as SHK, student assistants, who take on tasks for a few hours a week for a small compensation. At my host university, UC Santa Barbara, this concept is thought differently; here, very good students can earn ECTS points for their studies by taking over important tasks in research projects. […]

It is the third week of May 2023 and I have started conducting my in-situ study more than six weeks ago. During this time, I have faced many challenges – most of which were either related to my research equipment or the weather or both… As you might have seen in the news, we have […]

Beyond preparing the report on the project for the European Union, I have spent the last month thinking about the necessary steps to clean the real-world study data. Data cleaning is a first step in a chain of tasks which need to be finished in order to preprocess the data for further analysis. Cleaning the […]

It is the beginning of June and I have, finally, a first set of real-world study data collected. As explained in an earlier post, I had to overcome considerable challenges and find creative solutions. As of now more than 40 subjects have participated which is a lot given the circumstances and the time effort of […]

Ethics in scientific research is a multi-faceted and very interesting issue. I had been part of the Pilot Research Ethics Committee of TU Wien since 2021 and, hence, have a good knowledge about reviewing studies involving human participation. It is very interesting to see the differences and commonalities in Ethics review vs approval. While we […]