The project consisted of 4 groups of pairs in a room, however no-one knew who they were paired with, simple text chat protocol was used to hopefully level out the playing field of group dynamics, i.e. a quiet and a loud social worker discussing points will result in the louder social worker's opinion being projected to a greater extent than the opinion of the quieter social worker so by using a computer to shield these aspects and hopefully not be a barrier in itself the test social workers discussed a number of scenarios and how they'd rank them in importance etc... and the other crazy things social workers get up to!
They were then instructed to write their own reports using the discussed information, this was achieved by using some on-line forms I created which mirrored the forms they would use in real life (yeah simulation to the max!) a screen grab of these said forms:
Then the next bit which I think is quite special is each submitted report, is then passed onto the next group, so a group was able to view another groups report and then re-assess the report. Again due to the fact no-one knew who they were speaking to within the room meant the information could be peer assessed/criticised without the usual worry about standing on people's toes or feeling like they're being a suck up etc... then these re-assesset reports can be edited and resubmitted.
All data form the reports to the chats was logged via a MySQL database which allowed for flexible analysis pre experiment. All coding was done from scratch with a fair amount of inspiration from this:
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