../2023-02-01-harp-reflective-survey

HARP Reflective Survey

Published: 2023-02-01

MBA Vercel VueJS

I started out with a piece of paper given to me on the MBA. A questionnaire about my research philosophy. How do my own views on the world influence how I perform research?

The questionnaire was interesting, but being an engineer, and liking a good diagram, I expected to find a website that allowed me to do this survey online, and get a pretty picture out of the other side.

No luck. I'll have to make something myself.

I found a good article by Saunders & Bristow on their development of the paper tool for use with students. I used this as the basis for what the questionnaire should look like.

What does it need to do?

Show a series of 30 statements
Allow the user to pick on a scale between "Strongly agree" and "Strongly disagree" for each statement
Allow to move back and correct an answer
Categorise the questions by two dimensions - the type of statement, and the research philosophy it supports.
Show an image of a radar chart that can be copied in to a report

I also needed to be able to build it quickly using tools that I knew how to use, with minimal effort.

What did I build?

I made a Vite app using Vuejs. I used graph.js for creating the images. I ended up making something that could generically handle any similar questionairre

How is it deployed?

I deployed it to Vercel. In order to make it appear as a subfolder, I setup a rewrite rule on my tallentire.dev deployment.

This JSON file rewrites requests to /harp/ to the index page of the vercel app, and all assets are rewritten below that folder.

{
    "rewrites": 
    [
        { "source": "/harp/", "destination": "https://vuejs-harp-reflexive-survey.vercel.app/index.html" },
        { "source": "/harp/:asset*", "destination": "https://vuejs-harp-reflexive-survey.vercel.app/:asset*" },
        { "source": "/(.*)", "destination": "/" }
    ]
}

What about my results

My research philosophy

I lean most heavily towards pragmatism. This means I focus heavily on identifying the problem, and how to practically resolve the problem. This can make certain types of evaluative study harder for me - for instance I find it difficult to write literature reviews, as it is important to synthesise and understand the information without trying to fix or augment the information from the literature.