Fix It Lucy Is a Doing Her Senior Thesis on How Music

Essay

Fix It
Lucy is a doing her senior thesis on how music makes people feel. She believes that the best approach to this topic is qualitative, since one's reaction to music is very personal and varies significantly from person to person. Lucy recruits 12 of her friends and family to participate in the study. She invites the participants to a focus group. Lucy decides to have a friend who is unfamiliar with the research topic moderate the focus group. Lucy's rationale is that she herself may be too biased and may influence her participants' responses; by having someone unfamiliar with the topic moderate, the discussion will be more authentic. After the focus group is finished the participants document their informed consent by signing their names to a sign-in sheet. Lucy transcribes the audio recordings the moderator made during the focus group and analyzes the data using t-tests and Pearson's r. She creates a poster to convey the study's results. On her poster she describes that women were significantly more likely than men to respond emotionally to music.
What design and analysis problems exist in Lucy's study? What do you think about how she communicated the results? Fix it!