In my second to last week in my DREU program, my project group decided to change a part of the implementation of our survey so that we can better control the conditions of what the survey participants see. To do this without having to pay for a lot more advanced features on popular survey sites, this week we spent a lot of time building our own server using Django. This took the whole week since we decided to track a lot more features since we could now control the environment of the LinkedIn profiles, meaning we could actually show them interactive websites instead of just screenshots.

This task was pretty big and we added a lot of interesting variables, such as interactive website features. We hope this will enhance the data we gather in our pilot study so that we can best decide how to implement the real study soon after.

Things are moving pretty fast as I head into my last week of my DREU program, and I’m hoping we can get the pilot study up and running during week 10 so that I can get some experience with analyzing the survey data and further study design. Either way, it was really great experience learning how to set up the server––something I had never done before in school.