About: This is the blog post for first peer graded assignment for the Coursera course ”Data Management and Visualization” but also my first blog post to study procrastination and reasons behind it.
Dataset: After browsing through codebooks available I found out that ”National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth)” included many interesting topics to cover in this study. I found out that variable ”It was hard to get started doing things (H1FS18)” caught my attention because I have been writing about productivity and wanted to study what are the reasons to not get started.
Codebook:
- ”You are well coordinated (Section 18: H1PF29)
- ”You have a lot of energy (Section 18: H1PF26)
- ”You felt that you were too tired to do things (Section 10: H1FS7)
- ”You had trouble keeping your mind on what you were doing (Section 10: H1FS5)
Research question: After studying codebook and different options to what could be the reasons to procrastinate (aka hard to get started doing things) I chose to study how keeping yourself coordinated helps you to get started doing things? It is also interesting to see does lots of energy get you started doing things easier?
Literature search: After doing initial search with search terms ”coordination skills” ”procrastination” resulted few studies and results. I wanted to pick study question which was answered rarely. Two most relevant references used to create the hypothesis is listed below:
- What is wrong with perfect? http://blogs.spsk12.net/4576/files/2012/10/Perfect-RIMM.pdf
- Life skills education through Schools: https://books.google.fi/books?hl=fi&lr=&id=Jh0r2-tQsEoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA132&dq=%22coordination+skills%22+procrastination&ots=UGd2Vry1NG&sig=AWwlpuQDxqxvDV5IdWncO2cg6J0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Summary of findings: Literature search from the first reference stated that perfection (for keeping yourself coordinated) could prevent you to get started. Another source stated that kids with development coordination disorder are very likely to be easily distracted.
Hypothesis: After doing literature search and summarizing references I have come to a hypothesis that ”Keeping yourself coordinated prevents you to get started doing things”. In my opinion this is the opposite you are expecting to happen at the first place.