good night

I am so tired. That’s why I have been pretty lazy about blogging. The weekend was exhausting, although informative, and I made several contacts with graduate students and faculty from other universities. But it’s so hard to recover from being out of town. I had several assignments due during the week and a presentation to make tomorrow, so I haven’t even had time to unpack my suitcases. I did manage to go food shopping and celebrate my husband’s birthday, but I am keeping Starbucks in business and driving my family nuts with my moodiness because I am so freakin’ tired.

And that reminds me - I got sucked into taking a sleep survey this evening. I figured it was good karma in case I ever wanted to put out a survey for my own work. But I learned a lot about surveys in the process of taking it.

1. You should always tell someone how long the survey should take and then you should stick to that. I asked the woman, and she said she was going to go really fast to get through it. It took a half hour. That was not what I expected.

2. As a result, the questions at the end were not getting my full attention. I was really annoyed. So don’t make the surveys too long.

3. You probably shouldn’t answer the questions for the respondent based on what you think you know about this person. One of the questions was about stress, and she told me that she was going to say that yes, I’ve experienced a extremely stressful event in the past year because of the birth of my daughter.
I wasn’t allowed to answer the question myself. I actually didn’t consider the birth to be as stressful as afterwards, but I didn’t get the chance to say that. Is this a reason why surveys shouldn’t be trusted?

That’s it. I’m going to bed. Good night y’all.