Good afternoon!
What a wonderful end to such an interesting week. This week was gone in the blink of an eye! It is so hard to believe that I have already been here for 4 weeks!
I began my work week with our first meeting (Anna, Max, and I) for the codebook–as I mentioned in my last post. During this meeting, we each had to explain our themes in detail, and support them with excerpts from our data. Each of us had themes that were relevant, but the most difficult part was deciding what our main themes should be, what to classify as subthemes, and what themes to get rid of. I outlined our Abstract, and developed our Introduction so that it could be ready for Peer Review this week.
Tuesday was all about recruitment for us. As a researcher in Informatics, I am starting to see how it can be difficult to contact people. I called over 10 grief/bereavement support facilities, and was unable to speak to any of the coordinators or counselors. I was transferred to countless voicemails, and it started to become exhausting. We created a spreadsheet to keep track of who we contacted, so that we could have their information, and know when to follow-up on recruitment. We met for a second time to discuss the code for our second group of participants that we analyzed. In total this week, we completed three iterations for our codebook. Two of the major themes from our data that I am interested in are normalizing, and social media. Several participants expressed how they felt better knowing that their feelings were “normal” or that they had others to relate too. It was also evident that participants used social media to either tag deceased, express their feelings, (missing their loved one), and posting older memories and photos.
This week’s Wednesday workshop is gonna get me right! I did not know that creating a professional online presence was so important. After that session, I am so excited to outline how I want my website to be! Professionalism is important no matter what career path I may choose, so learning the does and don’ts of online presence was pretty cool. Wednesday-Friday our main focus was on learning HTML & CSS.
The limitations, and challenges this week were not being able to have a meeting with our mentors Dr. Shih, and Dr. Clawson to receive direct feed back on how we are doing with our codebook. Failure for the week was sending out surveys that were not updated. Other challenge was organizing and replacing themes in Dedoose. Finally, trying to make sense of our themes was also a challenge.
I ended the week finding out that we have 50 more respondents to our survey! (Sheeeesh) I have to prepare mentally for the upcoming weeks. We will have to prepare a video on our research, do service with the Girl Scouts, take professional pictures, conduct pilot interviews, interview participants, continually conduct peer reviews, and iterate on our research. With the current pace that my research study is going, I think that our results yielded in the end will be like no other. Everyone is thinking ina new perspective on how to approach grievers, and that’s exactly what we need to produce a design that can be applicable.
The next step for the upcoming week is to conduct pilot interviews, and continue with HTML & CSS tutorials. Definitely have to spend some time looking into cross-platform application usage, and brainstorming ideas to develop prototypes for the participants in our research community. Annnnnd of course, reading more papers! We should have at least 20 papers for our related work by the end of this summer. The most important lesson I learned this week was that iterating is a huge part of the research process.
Giving you my personal perspective from the palm trees of SC to the corn fields of IN.
-Meagan Price