Starting the research!

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It has been a busy few months but my research project has finally been launched! the fieldwork risk assessment form has been approved, recording equipment all ordered and two pilot interviews transcribed and analysed to refine the process. Recruitment for the interviews is underway and I’ve got the first one lined up for tomorrow.

No time is an ideal time to start research, and this may be particularly true regarding the run-up to end of term / Christmas. However, it seemed worth getting the ball rolling with at least some of the recruitment tools to see if I could get an interview done before Christmas, with a renewed focus in January, and it looks like that paid off!

I’m presenting in two Newcastle University lectures over the next few weeks (law and health). I’ve also made some personal contacts at Newcastle college through a friend undertaking an NVQ in hairdressing and somebody I met at a conference in Hull who actually works for the college (lucky!). I will also start on workplace recruitment and university societies in January.

My website is also up and running, along with a Facebook page.

September

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This month I have been starting to think in more detail about the recruitment process and methodology, exploring different potential avenues for recruitment and trying to figure out the types of populations these routes will target. I’m working on a recruitment timeline, trying to make it more strategic so that I have a more coherent approach to the project and can deploy different strategies at different times (thinking, for example, about university term dates and holidays, specific events etc). Some of the early issues I have encountered have been that I have been suggesting a sort of ‘hands-off’ approach, when I need to look in more detail at some of the more face-to-face mechanisms I can utilise. I know I am focusing quite heavily on the use of a dedicated account on Facebook, however I really can see the potential value in this. So many of my target demographic use Facebook that I think it would be a mistake to overlook it, plus it offers a way for me to proactively target different night out pages and events, many of which have over 10,000 subscribers. This makes Facebook a free and low-effort way to reach a huge target population, plus it can be used as an ongoing process (e.g. targeting pages for upcoming events) rather than a one-off, meaning I can be flexible and responsive in how it is used, for example depending on which populations I need to target.

Alongside this, I need to ensure my research documentation (consent forms, information sheets, flyers and posters) are up to date and ready to go when the study is launched (hopefully at the start of November).

And of course, the interview and focus group schedules are constantly being developed and fine-tuned in the background. Obviously I don’t want to start trying to recruit if I am still some way off actually starting the research, as potential participants are more likely to lose interest. On the other hand however, I will need to balance this with ‘putting the feelers out’ for recruitment sufficiently early as there may be some time lag in securing participants.

Research Practicalities

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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!

Oops, note to self: do not forget to update blog.

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So the last couple of months have been all about continuing to refine down the actual research project. The theoretical framework seems to have clicked into place, then after I’d got some of the ‘how’ sorted I switched to looking a little more at the ‘what’. After all the reading to broaden out the research topic, it was time to hone it down again a little bit, as this was shaping up to be just about the most ambitious project in the known universe! Managed to limit down to a specific research theme or topic, so the next step has been to start thinking about the practicalities; methodology, recruitment, that kind of thing.

Now I reckon PhD students can broadly be divided into two categories. Those who just can’t wait to get out there and start thinking about the research itself, and loathe the thought of picking up another book and making yet more preliminary notes on some obscure theory, and those who love immersing themselves in the literature but are a little more hesitant about taking the plunge and thinking about how they’re going to actually DO their own research! I definitely fall into the latter category. I’ve pretty much been banned from reading anymore journal articles and making my ridiculously long draft literature reviews any longer. It’s time to face up and start thinking through how I am actually going to do the fieldwork. Who do I want to recruit? How will I recruit them? Am I going to use focus groups? Qualitative interviews? Both? Neither?! These are the questions that currently plague my every waking second. Well… perhaps not every waking second. Most. Some….

In other news, my ethics application was submitted initially at the end of February, it is easy to underestimate what a lengthy process this can be. After getting some feedback at the school level and making some amends in March, it has now been approved by the school and gone up to faculty level. Had a few more queries and now made those amends and sent it back, so fingers and toes and everything else crossed that it gets the final seal of approval now! Will be exciting to be one step closer to actually starting the research project.

Although that still seems like a fair old way away, the latest activity occupying the bulk of my time (bar avoiding thinking about the research practicalities and trying to resist going to the pub) is preparing for Annual Progression in May. This is the meeting I’ll be having with a panel of two members of staff (not my supervisors) so we can talk about my research, my progress, any obstacles or barriers etc. Then they’ll assess my progress, make a recommendation and hopefully agree that I can continue into the second year of my studies. So lots of documentation and evidence to pull together for that, hopefully it won’t be too terrifying!

New Year, New Start and all that baloney…

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It has certainly been a very busy time over the last month… Came back to a really useful supervisor meeting in early January, a great start and sparked off lots of ideas and new things for me to be getting on with, so the past month has mostly involved cracking on with all that in advance of the next meeting in mid-February.

Barring a nasty bout of tonsillitis, progress has been steady (if somewhat slow at times). I’m working on really refining the theoretical framework I am going to use and also revisiting the original research questions from my proposal in order to develop them into actual, real, workable ones. Real mixture of days, some just feel like the most extravagant exercise in procrastination, where so little seems to get done in 7 or 8 hours that I find it rather incredible and genuinely wonder what I could possibly have been doing with my time (curse you, Facebook!). Other times, the odd hour or two will see me coming along leaps and bound; I had a recent Eureka moment at 1am on a Monday morning. So I’m starting to learn to go with the weird ebbs and flows of desperation/inspiration….

I’ve really found that scribbling things down helps too. We live in such a technological age that even for a Luddite such as myself, the default ‘work’ action is ‘switch on laptop and open Microsoft Word’. However, just sitting with a pen and paper certainly has merits and makes it much easy to map things out visually, so I’ve amassed a nice little collection of haphazard and rather scruffy-looking diagrams over the last week or so.

I’ve also been working on my Ethics application over the last few weeks, which can be tricky when you are still only in the early stages of research, but can also help you to really consider what your research is actually about and how you can communicate that to other people, particularly participants. It’s a long old process and it has been good to get the ball rolling with it… so hopefully next Supervisor meeting the ethics application will be coming along nicely and I’ll have made some real progress with the research questions and theory more generally… not too much to ask is it?!

The Fine Art of Time (Mis)Management

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So, just over a month ago there I was, sat with a lovely ice cold beer in a lovely little pub in an unseasonably warm Amsterdam with my lovely fellow sociology PhD student Lauren and thinking to myself “Well, this PhD malarkey isn’t all that bad after all!”

After two years of working full-time, this felt like heaven. No crippling early starts every weekday morning, no need to have early nights and miss out on late night socialising opportunities, no having to wear ridiculous pencil skirts and send overly polite emails….

And yes whilst that is all true – ah wait I still send plenty of overly polite emails actually – fast forward to today and it certainly isn’t all fun and games…

You will of course be delighted and relieved to hear that I am actually getting some of this ‘work’ thing done and not still in Amsterdam wandering lost around the Red Light District with no money – it’s very expensive over there! – and a lack of appropriate winter footwear.

The first couple of months since starting at the end of September have certainly been a time for finding my feet and getting settled into a routine. Obviously it is so different to working and the main thing I’ve noticed already is how motivated and self-disciplined you need to be (I mean self-disciplined in the work sense only, I still eat biscuits at every opportunity)…. With a job you just sort of have to turn up and sit down and switch your computer on and actually start working, or you tend to find yourself in a whole lot of trouble (although some of my more misguided friends would beg to differ as I did work in the public sector). Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to procrastinate in every job, but this PhD is a whole different animal.

With a lot of unstructured time stretching before you and few immediately looming deadlines, plus the fact that three years seems like such a very nice long time to get everything done, you really do have to find innovative ways to get yourself working sometimes.

Setting lots of little deadlines and tasks for yourself for the day or the week helps, plus you do always have the next supervisor meeting to work towards. And then of course, once you get really into looking at a text or you start writing time can suddenly fly and you realise you’ve spent hours having an amazing time in the company of Foucault, Marx or some other big-thinking dude. And I must admit that so far – mostly – my experience has been really positive and inspiration levels have remained promisingly high. The PhD and I have been getting on very well recently. Just enjoying a lovely little Festive break and looking forward to being reunited with it in the New Year. Fingers crossed we will get off to a good start in 2012, although I don’t doubt that some sort of hurdle / writer’s block will make an appearance at some point in the near future!