Once you have completed all the steps so far, you are ready to collect your data.

The design of your study will determine, in many cases, where you collect your data. If you are doing research on employment, you may collect your data at your job. If you want to study children, you may want to go to a day care center to observe behavior. Talk to your instructor if your data will be collected outside of campus to see if there are any special IRB requirements and/or authorization required from the site.

If your research targets college students, you are likely going to use the Experimetrix system, otherwise, you will collect your data within classrooms. If the latter is the case, you may want to access a representative sample by collecting data from classes in different departments and at different levels (100 level, 300 level, etc.). On the other hand, you may just want to learn about psychology students.

At this point you should already know what your population is and more than likely you've included that specifically in your hypothesis.

Students usually collect their data from any of the following:

• Experimetrix (described below)
• Within classrooms (either psychology classes, classes they are taking, or classes throughout the university).
• At work (if relevant to your study and approved by IRB)
• In public places (including across campus)

Go over the checklist below to make sure you have all the requirements:

• You are advanced enough in your introduction that only minor changes will be necessary as of this point
• Your methods section has been approved by your instructor
• You passed the IRB test
• Your IRB proposal has been approved

• You want to save as much money (and trees) as possible, so try to make your questionnaires fit into fewer pages and thus require fewer copies. However, be careful not to crowd the sentences together, since you want to make sure students are able to read and mark the answers correctly! A good idea is to use the shading option in Word to separate sentences instead of using extra lines between sentences. You can also put two short questionnaires together in one page, instead of putting each questionnaire on a separate page. Some time invested in this will save you money in the end.
• You also want to have (you probably have already) a script written up of what you will be saying to your participants. Remember, you want to administer your questionnaires in the most standardized form possible; therefore, reading off a script to make sure you are presenting the same information to all participants/classes is a good option.
• Think ahead about how you are going to organize your recruitment. If you are recruiting individuals outside of campus, you may think about ways to make people confident that the information they are providing is confidential (and hence you are more confident of truthful answers). If you are recruiting within classrooms, this is especially important since it has been identified as a concern by students. In both cases, think about having envelopes where people can put their completed forms and having separate envelopes for consents (which include names) and forms (which usually shouldn't). Within the classroom, think about having a sign up sheet for extra credit (if there is any) that is separate from any responses and is left with the instructor (when you are working within classroom hours).
• If you are recruiting from classrooms and are using classroom time, try to organize the collection of data so that you take as little class time as possible, the instructor will appreciate this and be more likely to let another capstone student come in the future.
• Once you have a clean copy of your 'assessment package,' i.e. your informed consent (if necessary) and the questionnaires, administer it to a friend to see if any problems arise. Once you are confident the package is correct, show it to your instructor for a final check (unless you are instructed to do otherwise) before copying.
  
  Experimetrix
  
  Experimetrix is a wonderful new tool available to faculty and student researchers at IUPUI who are interested in college students as their subject population. Unless you are recruiting children or through the workplace, it is likely you will recruit through this mechanism. Using Experimetrix simplifies the recruitment process, and helps with standardized administration of research surveys as compared to the option of recruiting through individual classrooms. Therefore, it is the preferred method for Capstone students who will be recruiting university students for their research projects. Read the attached document that clearly and in detail explains the system, as well as how to access participants through the system.
  
  IUPUI Department of Psychology Subject Pool Use - Policies and Procedures