This page explains how you can use LUSTRE to help create and plan your project work.
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Choosing a supervisor
The department would normally provide information each year about project supervisors, and the research topics that they offer for project work. That forms an obvious starting point for familiarising yourself with what is currently “on offer”. Nonetheless, as LUSTRE projects a database of project records, you can identify and explore a lot of additional useful information with the system.
Filtering the database records according to a supervisor name:
- This will give you a set of project records that the supervisor has been involved with in previous years, and this may help you identify the style and scope of projects.
- You may find projects that are particularly interesting to you, and this could then be a focus for a conversation.
- You could explain that you liked a certain project and would be interested in doing related work, and your supervisor could give you suitable feedback (e.g why that project was a success, or how it could be developed, or maybe explain why it might not be the ideal project topic).
- Looking at the supervised projects, you might also notice some consistencies and commonalities, which can help you understand aspects of your project.
Filtering LUSTRE records by year of study
- You can filter the database records by year of study.
- This might be useful to get a feeling for how projects have changed, and how new topics have become more popular or certain methodologies have become more frequent.
- This may help shape your appreciation of what your project work might tackle.
- Bear in mind, of course, that a new staff member might not feature in the database because they haven’t supervised projects in this system, but they might have extensive experience and ideas that they bring from elsewhere!
Exploring methodologies and statistical analysis
- You can filter records by methodology and statistical analysis.
Methodologies are attached to projects on the basis of assigned “Topics”. For example, some projects involve interviews, some projects involve EEG recordings of brain activity. Interviews and EEG are both “Topics”.
Using topics, you can find out more details about projects that are relevant or useful to you. Do bear in mind that a project can be assigned to only one topic though, even though in some cases multiple methodologies may be partly relevant. But you can also search by keywords too.
Each project also has an indication of the statistical analysis that was applied to the dataset as part of the project write-up. Multiple statistical may be recorded when these have been relevant. Bear in mind here that the responses indicate what a student chose to use for analysis, not necessarily what the optimal or alternative options could be.
- Using this filter can be useful for spotting trends and thinking about the scope of your potential project.
You can ask yourself; are there statistical techniques that you will want to consolidate and increase your confidence in? You can look at past projects that involve particular statistics in order to get a clearer idea of what these projects involve (and maybe want they don’t)
Exploring sample sizes
- Project records provide details of sample size for the dataset.
- Sample sizes are important for statistical analysis, affecting the critical values for significance tests.
- From the point of view of planning, they also help give a sense of what typical projects have achieved.
- Sample sizes for a psychophysics experiment typically will be much smaller than a survey of attitudes and beliefs, but data collection will be much more intensive in the former case.
- You might want to think about whether project sample sizes seem feasible for your own project (how realistic would it be to collect these data?), and this might also be something you can discuss with your supervisor.
Examples of blank consent forms
For most project records, where students have provided them, there is a blank consent form that was used for the study. This consent form has multiple purposes.
- First, it provides information about access statements or access restriction on the data (that is, what did participant agree to with respect to their data).
- Second, it provides an example of a previously used (and approved) consent form for a study. If you are thinking about a project similar to one of the records on the database, you might consider using- and adapting- a consent form that already exists. Where possible, consent forms are made available as Word documents to facilitate further.
- Of course, over time, consent forms and their contents change and evolve with best practice and with specific research objectives, so it’s best not to assume the consent forms are ready-made template for your own use.
- However, they can be a really useful resource for your own work.