About Me
I am Lily Witte, a second-year undergraduate student at Indiana University - Bloomington in computer science and I plan to graduate in Spring of 2027. I am a student-athlete at IU; I am on the Women’s Swimming and Diving Team. I traveled and competed in the Olympic trials this summer for diving in Knoxville, TN. I am traveling to Florida with my family for vacation this summer before school starts up again.
Email: liwitte@iu.edu
About My Mentor
My mentor is Dr. Katie A. Siek, a professor in Informatics at Indiana University - Bloomington. She integrates pervasive technologies in health and wellness environments to study how technology affects interventions as part of the ProHealth group. Dr. Siek’s research interests include human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and health informatics. Website: http://wphomes.soic.indiana.edu/ksiek/
About My Project
Our research project will investigate the needs of people who experience Pelvic Organ Prolapse (POP) by qualitatively analyzing the posts they create on Reddit. POP affects countless women after giving birth, impacting their daily lives, and yet most women are not aware of POP and do not get the assistance they need. Our research will dive into three main aspects: informational needs, sources of information, and rehabilitation experiences. Our approach involves Reddit scraping techniques, ethical data collection, and qualitative and quantitative analyses. Our research aims to enhance care and support for POP patients.
- week of 6/3: Completed the CITI and RCR exams, created an elevator pitch about our research project, created a qualitative research checklist based on the work of Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, started reading, analyzing, and writing summaries on POP background pubs and CHI Reproductive Health pubs, overviewed the current scrape from Colin LeFevre
- week of 6/10: Completed the initial outline for the POP background, related works, and methods, continued adding citations, and reading research papers related to our study, read through the top 25 most commented-on Reddit posts in each subreddit (r/PelvicOrganProlapse, r/PelvicFloor, and r/beyondthebump)
- week of 6/17: Completed the introduction outline, completed the full draft of our methods, started the work and partially completed the related works draft, continued to read through the top 25 most commented-on Reddit posts, looking for themes and taking notes.
- week of 6/24: Completed the first draft of the introduction, continued editing the methods draft based on peer reviews, finished reading through the top 25 most commented-on Reddit posts and used notes to brainstorm ideas on qualitative coding, helped create the first, rough pass at the codebook with codes and definitions, set up and learned about LaTex (the website/framework we are using to write our paper)
- week of 7/1: Learned how to use LaTex and transferred all work, continued editing introduction, methods, background, and abstract based on peer reviews, discussed the newly created codebook as a research team, made edits to the codebook making sure to accurately represent all the data, created a Dedoose account and learned about what it is
- week of 7/8: continued editing introduction, methods, background, and abstract based on peer reviews, continued to make edits to the codebook as a research team as we looked closer at the Reddit forums, and started coding Reddit posts and comments on Dedoose using the codebook we created
- week of 7/15: I focused almost all of my time on coding (based on the codebook we created as a research team) the thousands of excerpts we scraped from Reddit forums and I started analyzing the data and codes and finding things that were interesting/stuck out to later create an analysis.
- week of 7/22: I developed themes for the analysis of the data and focused in on specific analysis points, created a summary of all the data to write an analysis, and extracted a large number of quotes from our data to demonstrate each part of my analysis.
- week of 7/29: We discussed poster designs as a team and examined examples of the good/bad, began designing/adding information to our research poster, wrote the analysis, peer-reviewed, and edited the analysis section based on reviews, and created tables for the analysis
- week of 8/5: I continued editing the analysis, wrote an outline for the discussion, wrote the discussion, wrote the limitations, and continued working on our poster and adding information/visual details to it