So after a lovely holiday in South East Asia it is time to settle back down and refocus. This is somewhat daunting when you open up word documents you sent to your supervisors just before going away and can barely recall /understand anything you’ve written! But I am certainly getting there and starting to get back into the swing of things.
The pesky research questions are still a work in progress, but it is just so important to get them right, hopefully finally got them down to (near enough!) the final version now… still working on the practicalities of methodology and recruitment currently. Got the basics down but now time to really think about the nitty gritty details and the groundwork I need to do before I can start recruiting, so I’m working on getting a snazzy website set up to provide potential participants with further information about my research project and details of how they can contact me. A few other tasks for the next month include contacting local colleges and universities to see if I can come and speak to students about my project and try and get some face-to-face recruitment done. Also need to look at opportunities to get a flyer or advert posted in some local publications, and get myself a dedicated mobile number and email address for communicating with participants. So there has definitely been a clear shift now from the theoretical and background research towards thinking about actually doing the research, feels like I am entering an exciting new era…
My ethics form has been approved at faculty level too so that has been another satisfying and important step towards actually starting the fieldwork, exciting times!
Annual progression went well too, and delighted to say I passed and am allowed to progress into second year!