======= Date Modified 01 Oct 2011 14:19:19 =======
trust me, when you're half way through transcription and then in the lengthy process of analysis and interpretation, statistics seem far more appealing. All you have to do is read a chapter on whatever test you need to use and learn it - probably take you a week, rather than the months and months of agony you'll have to go through with qual.

I'm currenty writing up my qual findings so may be slightly biased ;-)

I think I figured it out! I stopped them being wrapped or something and they stopped jumping about :-)

How do I stop them jumping about the page - they seem to just randomly jump into sections of text and divide their cells between lots of pages. :-s

I have another question!!!


Can I say "the penguin participants did not appear to consider fish as important in their diet" or does the 'did not appear' completely conjecture???

this is completely normal, so don't panic.

I'm sure others have better words of advice, but for now, I'd keep in mind that its the start of term, he's probably thinking "oh my god, I have SO much stuff to do, all these lectures to give and new students trying to crash my office every 10 mins, I'm so glad that CloverCloud is independent and has been able to get that document off"

He could also be a like a lot of supervisors who don't really care about the 'procedure' type of stuff and do the bare minimum to keep in line with uni regulations, but get bored by forms etc.

oh you have to put this in your thesis!

going ok, but not fast enough :-( story of my life really haha! I need to finish the results by the end of today, otherwise I'll be seriously behind on everything.

I'm finding all this qualitative stuff really annoying. I can't say "women said this" apparently, which is irritating - finding it v difficult to write up the findings :-(

erm...ok.

Anyway, I really really need to push on with my work today. No 30 mins of staring into space today!

Goal 1: read current discussion section and plan out new dsicussion section.

I'm in a quandry. I have a quote with a swear word in it. Not sure whether to ** it out or leave it. It refers to a particular group and begins with the letter between M and O, if you get what I mean. I feel uneasy leaving it in as is..but then not sure if I dilute it in some whay by **ing it out?

I'm having trouble about how to report what my participants were saying. I've sorted the quote issue, but how do I report my interpretation? I've put things like

"participants felt that..."

and my sup has crossed it out, but hasn't put any other recommendations. I think she wants me to put stuff like "participants reported...." but I've put 'reported' SO many times it looks ridiculous.

Has anyone got any good ways of saying this type of stuff?

I've had a think about it and will use numbers instead. Although that does kind of depersonalise the statements, I think the prejudice surrounding names is going to be tricky with my study. Also, making up names for one half of my sample (i.e. 20 participants) is going to be very tricky as I'm not clued up enough on each of their different backgrounds - i.e. they may have to have religious type names, that I'm just not aware of, so may accidently introduce a major problem into the thesis if I use names. Numbers it is!

ok, well I'm going to write up and then look through and see if names will add anything.

On another note, my sup reckons my quotes are too long - they are anything between 15-110 words long, but most sit around 30-60 words. I'm not sure if I can really cut them though, they seem like good quotes to me :-(

======= Date Modified 27 Sep 2011 11:32:12 =======
thanks Rick, my findings are from 20 in each group - i.e. I have 2 sets of themes and I'm comparing the two groups of 20 in each group. I'm just missing those bits I read in other papers that say "For example, Jane first ate chocolate at age five: ["I really liked chocolate and wanted to try all the different types, but settled on dairy milk"]

hmmm.

Sorry that is not clear AT ALL. Imagine they are 20 men, 20 women, I have analysed their data separately and am now comparing the themes that arise in both (some of the same, some are different)

well, it went well and I've had some great feedback. It took me about 2 whole days to design the slides though and about a week or 2 of pondering about what to put in it. I'm now having an argument with the organisers who want to share the slides with all delegates. I've already had 3 delegates want copies so they can reproduce my workshop in their companies, but I'm damned if they're going to earn ££££ from just re-delivering a workshop I came up with and I'll get no mention at all :-s