Tag Archives: ethics

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?!