Every journey starts with one step...

O.k.

First step: check transcript 1 for accuracy.

I'll check back in.

Thanks be to god that no-one reads this...

because that way no-one can point out that it has been almost half a year since I've last posted.

O.k., time to refocus.

I'm looking for feedback on my survey from one last reviewer (who I am using as a surrogate committee member as the committee member who I have been relying on is MIA on sabbatical, not that I hold it against him, as I certainly have not given him any indication that I am in any sort of a rush).

Once that feedback is received and incorporated this weekend, my survey will be mailed out Monday morning. (brief interlude to see if I can find anything in google about the best time of day/week to send out an email survey. I wonder if Monday morning is actually not a great time - maybe monday afternoon would be better).

O.k, so what I need to do now is switch gears and get back to the analysis of my first study, which, as you may or may not know, I last looked at in early summer. This is the first time I've done qualitative analysis, and I know I'm going to use Thematic Analysis, and in fact am working backward a bit given that I've already done one run-through to identify themes I used to develop my survey. Talk about not rigorous. Aie.

I have 4 articles on Thematic analysis sitting in front of me. So my next task should be to read these articles and make notes on the relevant content.

Then I should review Model Thesis to see how Model Researcher discussed her qualitative data.

Based on these two reviews, I should have a framework with which to structure my own analysis. And that means opening up NVivo and reacquainting myself with my data.

Listen/read to each of my interviews and begin coding on my themes, and coding anything else interesting along the way.

O.k., so I'll post again when I've read the 4 articles.
tick tock....

What wonderful comments my surrogate committee member had for me - I really have the sense that she paid attention, which I've been desparate for, I must admit. And it was kind of her to praise my survey given she has no sense of whether the items actually make any conceptual sense. So, changes are made, and I'm ready to go on Monday afternoon.

I've also found the articles very helpful - I have 3 new tables on my wall, explicating the cognitive processes inherent in qualitative analysis, a step-by-step description of the process of thematic analysis, and a 15 point checklist of criteria for good thematic analysis. I feel much more ready and in control, realising that I've already touched on some of the steps, and I'm looking forward to diving back into my interviews and formalizing my review process. This will start on Sunday, as tomorrow is full of dr.'s appointments, visits to the laundramat, and grocery shopping for a dinner party. But I will re-read this and earlier posts to capture the feeling of 'quasi-flow' (yes, I made the word up, so sue me).

Must ... stay .... focussed ...

I'm not stopping here. I'm hopped up on caffeine and desperation, and I am not stopping here. This is a 'c'mon' post (new tennis term I learned from Wiki).

I will now focus in on political skills. I will:

• read over what I have read
• contextualize the quotes
• read over scale article
• add in a bit more information to flesh out what p.s. are
  

Yikes!

Why, o why am I paralysed with anxiety here? My list was so concrete, so sure. It had hope written all over it. And now, here I sit, having changed 2 of the measures in my survey (despite the fact that I spent a long time picking the first ones out, and no doubt had good reason for my choices, except that I no longer remember the reasons because I picked them so damn long ago!!!). And I have no idea where I got the content for a couple of the sections of my survey, and I can't find some of my original references, and I have spent the last few hours fruitlessly searching through my files and bookmarks to see if I can retrace my steps. Ah, I see why I am feeling sick to my stomach with anxiety. It all makes sense now. But making sense and getting past it are not the same thing.

And, to top it all off, even though I am booking weeks in advance, the restaurant Mr. There Yet would like to celebrate his birthday at is fully booked, and now the plans will have to be more circuitous and complicated. I'm stealing someone else's expletive and saying 'Gah'!

O.k., new plan of action. (I notice how often I say 'o.k.' when I'm trying to make myself feel like life is more under control). I will make a quick phone call and then I will take all my notes from my interviews and go to a coffee shop and make notes on the notes and then come back and try again.

I will be back.

Plan for today

O.k., today is the day that I create a brief rationale for the survey. I'm going to break it down and use this as a checklist.

- review notes from recordings and identify main themes
- pull quotes from interviews that support themes
- expand discussion to put quotes into context
- pull 3 supporting articles for each existing scale
- connect existing scales to themes
- describe item generation process for made-up scales, and connect to themes

This seems reasonable. I can do this. I'm giving myself 2 hours to review notes, and pull themes and quotes. Right after I eat my breakfast.

O.k., easy does it now...

if I just sneak up on my survey, really carefully so that I don't scare it away, I should be able to finish it tonight.

O.k., so I've only marked one

But it required a lot of feedback, and it's after midnight, and I'm tired, and marking graduate papers requires much more focus than marking undergraduate work, and I would not be doing anyone a favour by trying to mark one more...zzzzzzzzz

Ramblings of a person whose marking will never end.

Wow, nearly a month since I last blogged. It's a good thing that I'm not writing for an audience ;) (I love smiley faces. And because of this, I love that commercial that gently makes fun of the office mate who teases in her email, but reassures with a smiley face. But I hate emoticons. I think they are ugly and without class).

So I think it's likely been since around my last post that I last worked on my dissertation. Actually, that's not quite true - I squeezed in a 3-day survey writing fest in the middle of marking (marking which I should still be doing, but I must take a break). I stumbled on the idea of using a different concept in my measure - one that I should have thought of ages ago, but because I'm not really engaged in my field, it never occurred to me. And because I don't have a lot of students around who can help me on this (I even did a brown-bag presentation to a group including my faculty, and all I heard was the sound of crickets in response .... I decided not to take it personally, but it would have been helpful if they had at least a few comments...) And, as I think I've mentioned, while my advisor is amazing, he doesn't do research in this area at all, and I'm left feeling rather lonely. But, that said, I think that it's reasonable to include this new measure. But what I really need to do is sit down and explain my rationale for including these items in my survey, based on my interview data and on the general literature. And for that, I really need 2 weeks. But, in case you haven't looked at your calendar lately, it's now June, which means I'm now officially behind the very outside date I had set for my survey to be mailed out. Really, I don't know why I even bother to set these deadlines.

Something interesting I noticed was that I have a real tendency to want to use constructs as outcome measures when they are usually used as predictors, and vice versa. Does that say something about me?

O.k., I'm going to mark 2 more proposals before I go to bed. 2 more. Ready, set, go.

The opera, dahling....

My most amazing husband gave me tickets to the opera for my birthday way back in January. We have a new opera house that is supposed to be acoustically perfect, and we were both excited at the prospect of hearing a new type of music (both of us being opera newbies) and checking out the building. Then, even better, my most amazing husband came home from school with the news that we were being given 2 free tickets to La Traviata, and the opportunity to nose around a bit, if he would just spend a half hour setting up some sort of equipment that measures the sound in the orchestra pit. How cool is that! I'm so hyped! Now, what ever should I wear?...

As for using this blog for keeping track of my progress, I believe that I have been conspicuous if only by my absence. My only excuse is that I have done almost nothing but marking for the whole month of April. I'm in the last leg of one of my t.a.'s - the prof decided to add some short answer questions to an exam that is always m/c. And, to top it off, he didn't just add a few questions, he added 10. And the marking scheme is very vague (likely because this exam usually doesn't have short answer questions). And, as this is a survey course, that means I'm looking at 150x10=1 500 question to mark. In a week. While I have marking for a graduate level course. Yesh. However, I took a stack of exams into the backyard today, and at least enjoyed the sunny, sunny weather while I marked. It made the time go by more pleasantly.

And, I had a meeting with my advisor on Wednesday, which went very well. I finally found someone to transcribe for me, and she has been a wizard at it, and so starting on Sunday (once the aforementioned exams are off my plate), I'm going to go back into my interviews, coding for evidence (or lack of evidence) of the main themes I've identified for my dissertation. I think that, if I move quickly, I'll be able to pull together a survey in about a week and a half. I've already gone through the interviews once, but with the goal of identifying themes. This will be a much more focussed look at the data. The only snag is that I'm having a hard time figuring out how to include the idea I'm most excited about in the format of a survey. It's really another interview question, and then maybe a survey. If only I had the luxury of unlimited time. But, given that I don't plan on continuing in research, I feel a little less pressure to make this project perfect.

Also motivating (tho also scary), I attended a friend's defence, which was amazing. 3 studies, difficult to access population, lots of application. Interestingly, tho, it's taken her so long to get through the program (tho not too long, IMHO), that her perspective on her main theory has changed based on her experience with the population. I think that's so exciting, a demonstration of the dynamics of ideas and paradigms...

Well, I'm off to the opera - will post later...

So, another day gone and I'm deeper in...

Yikes. All I accomplished today was to save my transcribed interviews onto my computer from my email, re-save them in plain text, and save them in Nudist for later analysis. I cancelled on my spinning class, ate chips and chocolate, made a disappointing dinner (though I have to say, I am a new fan of spaghetti squash - Mr. There Yet thinks it's too mushy, but I just thought it was cool...), watched too much t.v. (design shows that remind me of what I can't afford - I swear that these home decorating shows and magazines are secretly funded by home furnishing stores and paint/wallpaper places). And so now, although I have to be up too early tomorrow morning, I can't calm down enough to sleep because I'm so consumed with guilt. And then when I try to make meta-attributions about how difficult it is to switch gears between such different tasks as marking and dissertationing, etc., etc., etc., I feel even more guilty because I know so many more people who are working so much harder for me, etc. etc. AAARrrrgh!!!

Tomorrow I'm going shopping with a friend whose looking for a wedding dress, but I tell you, on Thursday, I'm going to be a machine. A slow, steady machine with a to-do list clutched tight in her vise-like grip. I won't set expectations that are too high and impossible to meet (thus guaranteeing failure and giving me an excuse to give up). I will create a reasonable amount of work to be achieved, and move systematically through the list.

1. pick up papers/marking key at school (make excuses about lack of progress to advisor who is also who I have to see to get the papers/marking key)
   
2. find sessional instructor to get summer t.a. contract signed
3. give last interview to transcriber for transcription
4. say hello to friend who may be in from out of town
5. say hello to friend who works at school
6. attend spinning class
7. mark

That sounds like a good amount of work. What I need to do is figure out is how to work on marking and on my dissertation at the same time. Because I have at least 2 more sets of marking coming to me in the next two weeks, and I just can't put off working on my dissertation that long. I was talking with my mother today, who was lamenting that she had never seen me so into my work before all this marking hit me.
And it's true.
The incredibly strange and wonderful thing is that I really love my dissertation topic. I hated it for a long time, when I was trying to create the proposal, and was struggling with a huge fear of evaluation (the comps process was a bit touch and go for me) and my poor advisor (who is one of the best advisors of any advisor I have ever met, and I have all good things to say about him) was willing to accept random paragraphs from me just to get me writing. And I had to read a thousand of the driest, most boring, and least relevant articles that were tangentially associated with my topic because there has been so little academic research on my area of interest. All of this in the context of me being in a program with which I have major epistemological, pedagocial, and interpersonal differences. It was a dark time, let me tell you.

And then I discovered qualitative research, and it was cool, but still, I was trying to get this proposal past my committee, and I was talking about what I wanted to research, and at no point in time did I really have a focused sense of what I wanted to find out. I couldn't even come up with a title for my proposal, because I was that unclear about what I was researching. And everyone (except my advisor) kept telling me I should keep developing my ideas, or that I really should be focusing on this or on that, and I felt increasingly worried, because I knew enough about my topic to know that I didn't want to focus on this or on that, and that there was nothing left in the literature for me to read that I hadn't already read, but I obviously wasn't communicating my ideas in a way that inspired confidence in others (except my advisor).

But I wrangled approval from my committee and dug into data collection, and based on a pilot study, created a (very loose) interview schedule, and started interviewing people. And, I have to say, it was like magic. Because everything came from them. This is not to say that I was a totally passive passenger or anything, but all the content came from my participants. And regardless of the fact that I intellectually understood that, in my heart, I was terrified that, at the end of 15 interviews, I would have no better idea of what to say than when I started. And just the opposite has happened, I've barely started the analysis, and already I have more to say than I could have imagined. And my fear that everything would remain at a descriptive level, and I would stand up in front of my defense committee with no theory to refer to, and they would say, how could you possibly think you deserve your Ph.D. when all you've done is provided us with the equivalent of a magazine article? That was taken care of too. I have theory jumping off the page. I have distinct differences between my participants that I can explain using theory. And you have no idea what a relief that is to me.

So now I just need to figure out how to take this massively rich, exciting information, and jam it into a survey that I need to do because my field isn't that excited by qualitative research methods, and to make it an easy defence, I'm cow-towing to expectations and including a survey. But so much of the cool stuff from the interviews doesn't make sense as a closed answer survey question. Anyway...

O.k., so that posted, I think I'm getting the hang of this.

I also recently got pulled into Facebook - which is making me reflect on this whole electronic communication phenomenon. I seem to be on the high end of the age of Facebook users, and everyone I know on Facebook seems to have signed up for it in the last 3 weeks - I think there would be some sort of interesting sociogram-type study to be done there. Perhaps social networks on Facebook develop in a manner similar to the way infections spread. I am not falling into the facebook void, however - I'm constantly amazed at how often people update their sites. That said, it was very fun to find people I lost track of over 10 years ago...

Now, I should establish a ground point, a baseline from which I can compare my progress this summer.

• I am finished my data collection for Study 1.
• I must analyse said data (interviews) to create a survey for Study 2.
  
• I must gain my committee's approval of my survey
• I must find people to whom I can send my survey
• I must achieve about a 50% return rate by shamelessly offering desirable prizes for participating in my study
• I must analyse Study 1 data (qualitative analysis - never done it before)
• I must analyse Study 2 data (quantitative analysis - having done it before, I'm not thrilled to be doing it again)
• I must re-write my entire introduction, update my methods, write up my results, and tie all of it together in a discussion
• Again, I must gain my committee's approval
• Defense

The plan was to send out the survey in May, but I was ambushed by marking for my (slightly overlapping) 3 t.a.'s. And I wondered, why am I insane enough to have taken on 3 t.a.'s? How can I possibly have thought that would be a good idea? I'm finally getting on a role here, I'm interested in what my Study 1 participants have had to say, I'm enjoying boring everyone I know by talking ad nauseum about my first reflections on my interview data, and now I have to put it all away for 4 weeks (which is an eternity to be away from your research when you're trying to figure out what you have in front of you) and mark undergraduate essays and exams, and be disappointed once again in the willingness among these students to plagiarize, and their stupidity in thinking that I can't tell the difference between their writing and the writing of a professional researcher, but then I remember that I need to eat and pay rent, and I sigh and I keep marking, because where else will I make $30/hour?

So, right now I'm in a brief window between marking, and rather than dig back into my survey design ideas, I'm starting a blog. Yes, that's right, I'm starting a blog. Because I need help getting back into the flow, and when you work at home with no one around to chat idly, to toss ideas around, then it's hard to get back in the flow. Especially because I know that in 2 days, I'll be back to marking. Hmm, now I'm feeling guity that I'm blogging instead of reading. Perhaps I'll assuage that guilt by making lunch. A gir's gotta eat, right?

testing 1, 2, 3

So I am unsure about the technical aspects of blogging, but I am certain that I need some sort of outlet for my procrastination, and I am rationalizing time spent blogging by telling myself that it will serve as some sort of log of my progress, and perhaps will even help me to focus my energies on that which they should be focused on - the completion of my Ph.D.