Hi everyone,

Probably you all think this is kind of silly but I think I just need to speak about this with someone who actually can understand what I am feeling.
I've been beating myself up over a silly mistake. Basically, I've been testing my participants for a couple of weeks now. Since the first day of testing, I've noticed that the room didn't have the best conditions as we could hear pretty much everything that was going on in the room next door, which is used for lectures. The other rooms available for testing have the same problem but are not next to a lectures room.
Because I knew that the other rooms had the same problem I just didn't bother to bring this up in the supervision meetings, when there were so many things worrying me. Plus, it was not like there were lectures all the time.
However I brought this up in a meeting with my supervisor last week and he was quite concerned with the fact that this could actually interfere with my results, specially because my participants need to learn a specific task and if they were distracted this probably didn't happen. And he reminded me of a room (from another building) that is actually sound proof and he said I should have used that room instead.
I'm basically beating myself up because I should have thought of that before, specially as a I am using that sound proof room for other purposes. The main reason why I feel so guilty is that I think that at some level I actually didn't want to use that room because it is so dark and depressing.
It is so silly that I didn't take seriously the room conditions, it is such a basic thing.

You're welcome to share silly mistakes :)

Thanks for reading!

ahhh the benefits of hindsight! I'm currently facing into a deep hole of silly mistakes i have made in the past and which are coming abck to haunt me, but i refuse to let them win! no point beating urself up about it Phd_Saga, truth is these things happen throughout the course of your phd and with the best will in the world sometimes you just cant help it. Whatever your reasons (subconscious or otherwise) for not using the room, you can;t do anything about it now. Just do what you can with the data, see if it possible to re-run the study, you never know it might be an interesting aside to your thesis to include a bit on the influence of distractions on the experiment, although it's not really my field so I'm not sure how plausible that may be.
For the future, you now know one of the things to think about when designing you experiments and it's another lesson learned. Onwards and upwards! Now if only I can stop making silly mistakes myself....it's something that has plagued me from primary school, I've lost count of the amount of maths questions I got wrong cos the working out was right but I wrote a wrong number or something somewhere....

Thanks a lot Algaequeen!

the PhD is essentially research training, so its fine that you make mistakes. You can learn from them. At least you have realised this now, not right at the end. There are many mistakes that i have made in my PhD which I now feel like I have to patch up and hope no one notices in the viva. E.g. not asking the correct question in a survey, or my most annoying one at present - not checking my recording device worked, so most of my interviews are useless with stupid BZZZZZZ through them :-s

Learn from it, think about these things next time and voila - you are an 'experienced' researcher!

Ah the joy of hind sight. There are so many things I’ve done over the last two years that I look back and think why did I do it like that? If I could start over I’d have a much much better PhD at the end of it!
For what it’s worth my PhD involves cognitive testing and the vast majority of participants have been tested in noisy environments. One patient even turned up with her toddler and my colleague had to entertain him and stop him distracting mummy while I tried to test her (this little fact won’t make it into the thesis!!) I guess as long as everyone gets the same level of distraction it will even out, it’s only a huge problem if one group were tested in the noisy room and another in the quiet.
Don't beat yourself up about it and don't blurt out in the viva "oh and this is a potential confound ...." and then point out all the flaws in the study that the examiners probably hadn't even noticed! That's what I'm scared of doing anyway!