I am so sorry!
Yes, I am a terrible writer an I did indeed abandon you
again. Horrid person I am and all that, yeah I know.
Well today is the first chill out day that I have had in
AGES.
So I will just rush over some details,
Basically I put my ethics form in and then it came back two
weeks later, one week before interviews with farmers were meant to start,
saying yes but no.
Essentially I had been approved in theory, on paper yes, in
practise no. I had a few amendments to make, that even some of my lecturers
think are ridiculous, and resubmit. With one week left to the term. Are you
fricking kidding me?! Anyway my awesome pawesome superviser apparently “accosted”
one of the ethics panel to push through my application and I think I received the
best email in the world (I know I need to get out more):
Dear Miss Thomas
Please note your
ethics application has been approved in full following my recent run in with
your supervisor. Enjoy data collection.
Chair of ethics board
Then I got all excitable while trying to drink coffee, not
pretty very messy no need for details.
Next I went to my padre’s in west wales and was calling up
all of my old farming friends to find participants, bit last minute I know. But I did it, I got 5 to agree to being
interviewed in one night. Felt like an absolute boss (a bit dramatic iknow but
an accurate descriptor nonetheless)
My first two interviews were both under 25 mins long and I was
aiming for 35-50 min sessions, so I started to panic. I needed more
participants and soon. I only had 5 days in the shire. So I called upon any
researcher’s, the telephone book and started calling farmers whose name and
farm were familiar, I know terrible right? Nearly all of them (there were 3
more) agreed to be interviewed, the next few interviews were much longer and
the quality of them was amazing.
Finally all my interviews were done. And I left the shire. My
dad was very sad he couldn’t be a participant so I asked him the questions down
the phone and he got bored half way through… *rolls eyes and smiles*
Then the typing came, well not for me, I was snowed under
with other college work, so a good and wonderful friend of mine offered to help
with transcription, while I plodded on with a clinical review of the
psychological implications of being diagnosed with depression and a media
analysis of two papers reviewing their biases.
Epic fun (actually to be fair they were interesting!). Anyway, my
transcripts are now done, they need to have all identifying data removed, and
then I can send them back to my wonderful participants for them to read, if the
want to, which they all kept asking me… “okay, so youre going to send it to me?
Do I have to read it? Cant I just say yes its fine?”
So that is where I am
now.
And I am feeling pretty good about it
To do
- Analyse transcripts
- Coding
- Find themes
- Put those themes in bigger over arching themes
- Quotes for tables
- Write about quotes
- Researching for
- intro
- method
- discussion
- Write up
- Intro
- Method
- Results
- Discussion
- All the other schmancy bits
So we still have a long way to go….
But look how far we’ve come!
Take care till next time guys
Claire, who loves you very much and won't abandon you again... she thinks
