I decided a few weeks ago that instead of using the online survey as a pre-survey for my interview subjects, that I would use it to try and recruit more interview subjects. The good folks at the Baseball Think Factory were nice enough to post a link to their newsblog and after one and a half days, I’ve gotten 51 responses so far. I’m overwhelmed to be honest. I was hoping to maybe get four or five more people to interview, but so far, it looks like I’ll be able to get another 10-12 interviews out of this. Very exciting stuff. Anyways, if you are reading this, and want to send someone else the link to take the survey, you can send them to this site:

http://s-jpxnq-9336.sgizmo.com

If you reached this site after taking the survey, let me just take a minute to say thanks, and for those who have included email addresses, I’ll be in contact with you soon.

As I alluded to in the previous post, the latest bulletin board posting blitz has been quite successful so far. I’ve gotten at least a dozen people to email me back and we are on our way to getting an honest to goodness interview schedule going. Additionally, most of the people have been good about forwarding my request for interviewees to other people and to other mailing lists. In fact, the nice folks at Baseball Think Factory put up the announcement in one of their news blogs!  BTW, if you click on over you will find an amusing exchange in the comments section.  As if getting interview subjects wasn’t enough, most of the people have had kind words of encouragement for my research.  They’ve also directed me to a lot of good advice about conducting my research and resources that will be helpful in my research, i.e. the previous post on the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective was a result of one of these people sending me the link thinking it would be helpful.  It’s been a bit humbling actually.  I mean, I’m feel pretty knowledgeable about Sabermetrics, but I think pedagogically, we as researchers, often forget that we don’t nearly as much about the things we are studying, as the actual people we are studying.  I must say, I’m very encouraged by all of this.  Like most grad students, I’m a bit jaded and cynical about the nature of humans, but the response that I have gotten makes me hopeful that it is worthwhile to study other human beings.

Anyways, now I need to get to the business of getting things shored up for all of these interviews coming up this summer.  So, without further ado, here is to do list #2.

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Finding people to interview is proving a bit more difficult that I had anticipated. Mostly because, I’m in cold calling mode where I just email people that I know and ask them if they want to be interviewed and then ask them if they know anyone who might be interested in interviewing. I have about five interviews scheduled. The problem is that most of the people that I have scheduled are part of the key informants group. Most of the interviews that I want to do will be the rank and file sabermetricians, people who do not do sabermetrics for a living. I have two interviews scheduled. I don’t think I can reveal their names as I’m pretty sure that violates the confidentiality part of the human subjects research protocol described in the last post.

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