This week has been very humbling for me, and I have had to come to understanding of what my strengths and weaknesses are. We had our weekly meeting to discuss how everyone’s research is going so far.

I ended last week learning how to laser print, and I got to make my own name tag using Adobe Illustrator! I also learned basics of how to do 3D printing through tinkerlab. Katie gave us some great books to assist with completing our deliverables throughout the summer. Monday, I continued reading related work, and fine-tooth combing through the articles that I have already read. Anna met with us and gave us a script that we will be using to recruit participants for our research study survey. She even did a call to show us how it is supposed to be done, and what tone of voice we should have. By the end of Monday I wanted to have a summary for at least 10 papers that I have read through, and then filter through and decide which ones I would like to keep. I want to have a better outline of questions, and better organization of the articles based on their themes.

Anna, Max, and myself had a meeting on Monday as well where we discussed Storyboarding and prototyping in more detail. Prototyping involves creating, software, or a product to test before creating the final product. During the iterating process, Anna explained that we should remember to consider accessibility, features, expense, and usability. Our challenge was then to find papers that talked about the tools that have been used for grief.

This week was about preparing the Introduction for our paper, and completing the draft for our related work and methods sections. It was difficult to draft during this stage. I personally am struggling with communicating with my partner, so I think that I have failed in that aspect. I also have had trouble with constructing, brainstorming and effectively organizing our paper through ShareLatex.

Another challenge I had to face was coming up with questions to ask participants in the follow-up interview because I did not want to prepare questions that seemed insensitive. I also wanted questions that would allow the participant to expound on their personal experience.

Learning how to create an effective paper has been interesting and a challenge as well. I am glad that during our Wednesday workshop, we were able to hear perspectives from those who have written papers in the tech. field. The papers related to how to construct a paper were helpful as well.

The remainder of the week dealt with contacting local grief support groups for recruiting because we currently have only 8 participants, but half are interested in a follow-up interview so that will be extremely helpful. I began coding in Dedoose, using the data from our 8 participants. We were supposed to meet on this Friday to talk about our code, but we had to make sure we did the process correctly, so we had to wait for feedback from James.

Therefore, the next steps to take are to meet up with Anna, and Max on Monday, 6/12/2017  to discuss the different themes that we found based on the first 3 participants of our study so we can begin creating our codebook. We also have to create questions to ask facilitators, because we would like to interview them as well. We must conduct pilot interviews soon so that we can begin the interviewing process in the upcoming week.

Giving you my personal perspective from the palm trees of SC to the corn fields of IN.

-Meagan Price