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Wednesday 28 September 2011

Understanding what I'm doing

Last week after supervision I had a little 'crisis of confidence' episode. I didn't feel very certain about the procedures I was using to guide my coding activities. When I feel like that I usually ask for help or try to find help - so I asked the supervisors and tried to find some relevant literature. To me it doesn't matter if someone else thinks that I'm handling a situation well, it's how I feel about my handling of the situation that often matters. I just wanted some reassurance what I was on the right path and guidance if I wasn't.

I found Jennifer Mason's 'Qualitative Researching' and used the chapter on 'Organising and Indexing Qualitative Date'. Not only did it provide the necessarily reassurances I needed, often supporting the very practices I had put in place to guide what I was calling 'coding', it also suggested some additional practical procedures I could use as I continued to forge ahead with this stage of my research.

Often with qualitative informed methodologies, you are simply told - 'immerse yourself in your data', 'let your data talk to you' or 'just code for themes' - but what does this really mean? When you 'do' these things, or what you think constitutes 'doing these things', very often if doesn't measure up to the expectations of those who told you to 'do' it in the first place. Sometimes the literature can and does help - it provides a language of description for the things you are doing and clear steps that can be taken to guide your practice. Now I feel more confident in explaining what I am currently doing i.e. that I'm in the data organisations and indexing phase of my research, why this phase is important and how it fits into the rest of my research study.

So....a) I'm trying to create indexing categories that allow me to tag sections of my data, b) I have chosen to read my data in an interpretative and reflexive manner, c) these categories are related to the intellectual puzzle I'm trying to solve through my research, the type of data I've collected and my research questions, d)  using Atlas means I have a data base-type solution for the indexing and quick retrieve of data chunks - Atlas is not an analysis tool, I am only using it as an organisation and retrieve tool, the analysis of the chunks of data so easily accessible via the Atlas software will come much later.

And...in addition to these somewhat conceptual thoughts about what this phase of my research entails, Mason also offers some practical suggestions about what immersion might mean, like just listening to my recordings and re-reading my fieldnotes again, without the Atlas imposed categorisations I have already imposed and that it is perfectly ok to revise and review the indexing categories I already have. These categories don't automatically become your themes...and how you use the chunks of data is depended on many things, which her chapter on 'Marking Convincing arguments with qualitative data' will no doubt illuminate.

Saturday 24 September 2011

three years already?

Yes it is actually and while in some sense it has really rushed pass, in others senses I have left each and every minute of it. The whole week I've been thinking about this anniversary and reflecting on how I could never have imagined, even more than anything else that has happened in my life, that things would turn out as they have for me over these past three years.

In the past year I've began to see what a great fracture the move to the UK has been for my life. It's been dislocating, disruptive, fragmenting. And it's not something that I have come to terms with yet. Its almost like each time I consider it I see new angles and examples of this fragmentation. I'm settled here, but in so many other ways I'm just not. Academically ,especially in the first year, I felt stable but the longer I stay in the course the more unstable I feel. It's as if the longer I stay here the more I feel marked out as not belonging, not fitting in, always trying to say it or do it like they do it here, but always feeling like I just cant get 'that' right.

I'm not saying this whole experience has been negative, I'm just reflecting on what it has been and how much it has forced me to change, adjust and stay the same. The future is a blur for me, I can't plot out what I want to do next year or the next or in six years time. Somehow that isn't important - well of course it's important, but not important enough. It's like I know it will work out anyway. Maybe it's just my lack of ambition - simply happy to teach and never one to tie education to work opportunities. I just believe in education for education sake, a deeply personal thing (of course you can use it for social change etc...) something about the individual wanting to understand something to make their life better at a very intellectual level. If it helps or feeds into other aspects of your life or has a social outcome, then that it the bonus.

Monday 19 September 2011

Supervision,oh supervision

Last Friday in some glorious sunlight, SP and I sat in the Hub on some fairly comfortable chairs and waxed lyrically about our triumphs and tribulations as PhD students. Supervision as always dominated our discussion. It's the thing of nightmares and wet dreams and when you walking into a supervision meeting you are never quite sure whether you will be experiencing your worse nightmare or your most delicious wet dream (the sexual analogues, where the hell are they coming from?). I suspect that about 50% of your time as a students is spent trying to work out what is going on in your supervisory relationship, how to make things better, how to deal with your supervisors in relation to work demands and interpersonal dynamics or how to survive the freaking process. We didn't get to a point where we were able to reach any definite conclusions or solutions, as usual it was an open-ended discussion, something we could pick up, right where we left it, usually after one of us had a supervision meeting. Over the weekend I thought about writing up some of my thoughts about our discussion and my thoughts on the whole supervisory relationship in general, but, it's hard work generating these thoughts into coherent and logical sentences and I needed my energy to complete my progress report, review a paper and write some comments on that and tackle some transcriptions.


But it was obviously a matter that couldn't be left alone...because I had supervision today. I have the some old ritual with each supervision - I prepare, I write little notes of the issues I want to raise and my position on each of these issues and try to think positive thoughts in the run up to the meeting. I tell myself that as a 40 year old proud, intelligent, confident woman I can deal with anything and shouldn't feel intimidated. And in many ways this ritualised practice has worked well for me over the years at the OU. I have also noticed a new found urge to not only be aware of the power differential in the relationship, but to diffuse it through consciously reminding myself that I have a voice and I don't have to play the 'onderdaniger' student role if I don't want to. All my previous supervision experiences have been positive and affirming engagements, no reason why can has to be different. I have to change my perception...and maybe my experiences will change accordingly to.


But you know...things are never what they seem. Supervision today wasn't bad, it wasn't negative, it wasn't particularly affirming either (a pocket or two of it sprinkled in here and there) - it just was. I didn't come out of it bursting with enthusiasm for my ongoing research tasks or with new inspiration and ideas germinating by the second. Well maybe that's a bit melodramatic - expectations of germinating ideas post-supervision. Its just that thing about supervision, you always leave not knowing, not sure if it was good, if it was bad, if you performed appropriately, if you got what they meant, if they got what you meant. Spawning countless future discussions with colleague about what it might all have meant.
 Maybe therein lies the secret...supervision is about getting you to think, maybe even think differently.


Reflecting on my supervision experience today and the collective experiences of myself and my colleagues over the past 3 years...I am reminded of something Ron Barnett said at a conference I attended in 2007 - he said that students' assignments could be likened to gifts being offered for consideration and review. Gifts carefully prepared by students and filled with their anticipation and aspirations. These gifts needed to be received by lecturers sensitive to what might have gone into the preparation and not just simply dismissed  or given tired and disinterested attention. The metaphor of gift...

Wednesday 14 September 2011

and this is so different

I'm in the middle of writing up a first draft for one of my cases - nothing analytic, just some descriptive and exploratory stuff. I'm struck by how different the process is - the writing process that is - to all the other stuff I've been doing over the past two, no eight months. Writing has its own momentum and you just have to go with it. It eats you up inside and waits for no one - when the ideas are flowing you can't do anything about it except writing...I remember SP talking about how he couldn't sleep for wanting to write, how he had this insatiable desire to write, write, write until he was finished. When I'm writing I can sit up until whatever time if I want to get my ideas down on paper. Of course I'm not raising the times when writing is painful, slow, frustrating, when you just cant find the words you need - but in a way that isn't really the point of what I'm trying to say here.

I just want to savour this experience of difference and smile actually because this act of physically producing what I'm thinking, almost an act of crystallisation of something abstract, can be a very beautiful thing. I'm hoping my positive and optimistic sense this morning will remain with me for the rest of the day while I try to complete, write, what I need to today.


structural outline of what needs to be written today

Monday 12 September 2011

irritated and panicked

That's how I feel at the moment. How I've been feeling for the past few days. Just irritated and irritated with all things, but mostly the freaking PhD. I just want to enjoy the experience - really that is all I want but it feels like the whole freaking world is conspiring again this wish of mine.

Of course this isn't the whole story, it never is - I can't tell the whole story, the whole story only plays itself out in my mind at 1 or 2am at night when I can't fall asleep because my brain won't shut down with all the thoughts, ideas,anxieties running through it. I'm thinking about deadlines - the small little deadlines, like writing up a draft case study due on Thursday - and the big one, writing a thesis of 80 000 word by September 2012. The deadlines and its weight press down on my chest and I feel like I can't breath. Of course my rational self says, "take it one step at a time, once you get going you will be fine...this too will pass". But my rational self is having an immense battle with this other irrational, irritated and panicked self, practically paralysed by the deadlines and the amount of work that still needs doing. I just so much want to enjoy this whole process and the more I don't enjoy it the more pressure I put on myself to enjoy it and the more critical I get at myself for not freaking enjoying it. Oh how I am my worse enemy.

Anyway - psychosis aside - I've just completed my first coding cycle of about 60 documents. Tedious and at times monotonous but interesting and affirming - connecting me back to my fieldwork, the participants, the sounds, smells, the texture of that context. My categories need refinement, they need to be sharper, more precise, clearer and strangely I'm looking forward to doing that. To finding the story I want to tell. But the deadlines, the freaking deadlines and me wanting to do everything right the first time...working against me. My rational self is saying, " take it easy, you know what you need to do, write the freaking case study, write what you have at the moment, it doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to get it down, your thinking at this point in time". Yeah, yeah rational self I hear you.

Thursday 8 September 2011

Analysis in Atlas

I'm in analysis mode. I've just completed the first stab at analysing all the fieldnotes I produced for one of my research sites. The process is ok, a bit tedious having to read off and stare at the computer monitor for most of the day. I'm still not sure how working in Atlas will help pull all the threads together - I think this is more a issue about my unfamiliarity with the software than me registering a lack of confidence in using the software for my analysis. Interestingly, the more I work with the coding process the more patterns start to come through. I remember thinking on Tuesday when I just started with the coding - "What the hell is this going to give me?" So I'm feeling more reassured about where I'm going even if it isn't clear exactly what the specific direction is just yet.

I think I mentioned before, that I was taking guidance from my applied linguists friend and using aspects of his methodology, namely to complete a small pilot, to work out or operationalize some of my coding categories . I think it was/is a useful strategy but I also have to acknowledge that there is just so much fuzziness in qualitative methodologies and my coding categories always seem to bleed into each other. But having a strict and thought through 'definition' of the many of the codes beforehand is helping me to be more discerning about my coding choices. My coding definitions are sharper and more consistently applied across my data set - so I can 'tell' the different between a literacy practice vs a textual practice. Of course the definitions are my creation but I'm just trying to be reliable in how I apply that choice across all my data examples. I know this is sounding a bit prescriptive and tending towards a positivist paradigm, but I think I'm just trying to ensure a higher level of reliability in my coding approach. And in a couple of months after I've trawled the research methodology literature I will be able to offer an more credible argument for why I'm doing my coding in this manner...Yay, something to look forward to.

For now, back to Atlas and some of the other data I collected...lets see what that exercise delivers.

Monday 5 September 2011

after the holiday

I've been away on a short holiday. A holiday I didn't really want to come back from. I've been dreading having to go back to work. Yet for about 50% of the said holiday my thoughts drifted to my work and how I was falling behind because of the holiday. No rest for the wicked...and I'm starting to feel very wicked. Before the holiday I felt on the cusp on something - enthusiasm even for my work, for the work that needs to be done to get this freaking PhD out of the way. If there is anything I'm determined to do in the next 12 months it's to get this freaking PhD out of the way. So over the next couple of days I will get back my rhythm, my routine, my determination and just maybe my enthusiasm to finish this freaking PhD. I so wish I felt differently about my PhD,  it wasn't suppose to be like this, I was suppose to like it, enjoy it, learn from it...but as my good friend, recently taking inspirational advice from Tony Soprano, keeps telling "What you gonna do?"

Notting Hill Carnival

Salsa in the streets at Carnival

St Keverne, Cornwall


The Lizard, Cornwall
Mullion Cove Harbour, Cornwall

My great nephew Luke at his naming ceremony