This is the work I did when I was a Senior Statistical Consultant at the Center for Applied Statistics and Evaluation (CASE). Clients would come to us with their research needs - we helped with research design, data collection, data analysis, basically the whole package! For this project, my clients were the English department and the Writing Center of the university. They were interested in creating a diagnostic tool for Writing Anxiety. In order to do that, they asked us to help them with two main questions:

1.How prevalent are WA in students?

2.Who experience WA? What factors do they have in common?

I was the team leader of this project. I worked with the clients to understand their needs and expectation, with my team members to come up with a research plan and delegate tasks, with the supervising principal consultant to ensure the study is well-designed, and of course with the participants to collect data. Lots of communications! We designed a survey (sent to 200 students) to identify Writing Anxiety (questions on self-identified writing anxiety + set of questions on symptoms of anxiety in writing context – my background in Abnormal Psychology turned out to be helpful for this) as well as questions to identify factors that students with WA have in common (academic background, demographic background, attitude about writing, writing habits etc.)

With the survey data we presented, the clients were able to create a Writing Attitude questionnaire to diagnose WA. The questionnaire targeted significant factors identified from the initial dataset such as procrastination, perfectionism, impatience, and work apprehension.