I did have a few struggles this week. The main struggle that I had was feeling comfortable with talking with people on the phone. For our study we have to reach out to grief support coordinators and I am not the best person to speak with on the phone. I ramble and rant. Luckily Anna was more than willing to practice with me. We had a script to use as a reference when calling and Anna sat with me for my first phone call which helped me to feel more confident on the phone. I ended up getting the voicemail for the two groups I called so I had practice leaving messages as well. One of the groups that I spoke with was not interested in our survey, which I totally understand, but it was a bummer to know that we have spent so much time finding groups to recruit knowing that they may not be interested in participating. Another struggle I faced was trying to find more in person support groups. It is more difficult than you would think to find grief support in your area. I found that trying different terms like bereavement groups and child loss support were helpful in getting more results. We also expanded our search to areas surrounding Bloomington as well. Another struggle that I had this week was trying to expand the related work outline into a draft. I just had a difficult time trying to expand on the main idea of each section. Luckily, when Meagan and I began collaborating on it it began to flow more.

We had an awesome meeting with James and Anna on Tuesday. We sat outside at the IMU since it was so nice out and James did a very thorough job of explaining where we were and where we need to be. He stressed the importance of doing our methods correctly since they are the cornerstone of the paper. The majority of our meeting consisted of the process we need to go through to create our code books. In order to complete our code book we are individually reading the open responses from our participants to find codes. We are then going to meet up and compare our codes and see which ones we all had. Once we establish those codes we will move on to the next set and go on until we have a solid code book for our research.

Every day Meagan and I have been doing check-ins with Anna to see where we are and where we need to be. I like meeting every day because it helps us all to stay on track and know exactly what is expected of us and what everyone else is doing.

For the first half of the week I really focused on skimming many of the article I read last week. This helped me to solidify many of the themes I had noticed emerging from my readings. I paid particular attention to the article by Massimi and Moncur since Anna said they are two of the prominent people in the grief community.

In regards to the timeline we have established, we are on track which is awesome! We are still trying to recruit more participants for our study but things are going as anticipated. We had planned on getting familiar with dedoose and creating our codes for our code book, but we had a little bit of confusion on what the proper steps are to successfully complete this so we are going to do that on Monday,

Fun things from this week:

Tuesday: I put butterfly stickers all over my cube.

Wednesday: Meagan and I saw a skunk on our way to the gym in the morning and I saw an adorable baby bunny on my walk to work!

I went to the observatory with Julia, Meagan, Thomas, and Disaiah. It was a fun adventure because we didn’t know exactly where the observatory was so we went wandering down the paths in the woods. We found the observatory and I got to see Jupiter and four of its moons. It was so, so amazing. On our way home we took a wrong turn so we ended up by the big fountain with the mermaid and the fish so we took some pictures there.

Friday: We are planning on having a baking party in our apartment for tomorrow’s cookout.