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.