Once again, Research bites me on the nose and runs away laughing

I hit a snag today as I was trying to analyze the results of my Theory of Mind (ToM) and language study. The post-theory of mind measure had a reliability of .17, which is bad, very, very bad. It basically means that I can't use this measure to reliably assess whether there was any effect of our treatment. What happened was that we decided to use a ToM measure that someone had created, but they only included one of the pair in the appendix of the research article. So we contacted her (names will not be used to protect the identity of the uncooperative party) and asked for the other measure and the scoring protocol. She replied by telling us we could find it in her dissertation (which is in Toronto, Canada!!!). Unsurprisingly, we couldn't get ahold of it through interlibrary loan. So I made one up that I thought was similar to the other measure. Unfortunately, it didn't work. The reliability is so low that we can't use it. So I went ahead and bought her dissertation online for $41 (grumble, grumble) and contacted the teacher to see if she would be willing to give it later (which may be too late to pick up any effect of the treatment). If I was that lady, I would have emailed my whole dissertation to whomever wanted it. In fact, I already emailed my computerized version of the Tower of Hanoi to someone who requested it. See, I'm much nicer and cooperative in the name of furthering other's research.

So if you are out there reading this right now, please pray for me because I'm going to have to pull an all-nighter in order to code and analyze the children's passage summaries so that we have some results to speak of. And so that I can let go of my anger and bitterness at the aforementioned, unnamed, uncooperative individual. Blech!