To Reach Your Goal, Take a NeuroStroll™: A Neuroscience Based Approach to Goal Achievement

Methodology

All participants received a 13 question pre-and post-survey. The pre-survey was created in SurveyGizmo and sent electronically to participants a week before the NeuroStroll™ sessions. We asked subjects to identify a leadership development goal that was important to them and indicate the goal in their pre-survey. Participants then went through the NeuroStroll™ intervention. We sent a post-survey immediately after the session. Out of 41 participants, we received complete pre- and post-data for a total of 36 participants. Our analysis goal was to explore whether the NeuroStroll™ had any immediate impact on goal attainment perceptions, as measured by changes in pre-test and post-test scores.

The survey data was imported from SurveyGizmo, cleaned, and analyzed. We used IBM SPSS Statistics to conduct the data analysis, paired t-tests, ANOVA analysis, descriptive statistics, anomaly detection, and normalization. The data was imported into Tableau, a data visualization tool, to create graphs and tables.

Basic Requirements for Combined Analysis

To increase our sample size, we considered whether we could combine all pilot data. Specific assumptions about the groups and the data distribution are required to run a paired-samples t-test or a one-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis. In our study, the effect of the ANOVA analysis was also equivalent to a paired-samples t-test. We considered all required statistical assumptions before combining data. One outlier was detected, and after we removed the anomaly from the dataset, for a final sample size of 35, the assumptions of normality were not violated, as assessed by Shapiro-Wilk’s test (see Table 2).

Table 2 Results of Shapiro-Wilk’s Test