After a lot of searching, Meagan and I found a few websites that listed out many grief support groups throughout Indiana. We then went through the lists and identified the locations that were within an hour of Bloomington. We identified nearly 30 groups. We then went on to call these groups. Unfortunately most of the grief support leaders we tried to contact were not in so we will need to follow up with them if they do not call us back. It was very frustrating trying to find in person groups around us. I definitely learned how to refine my searches to try and find more relevant results to my searches. Having different terms to search yielded different results which helped us expand our search for more resources.

One struggle we have been dealing with has been recruitment for our study. It has been difficult to identify grief groups and to reach out to them. Grief is such a sensitive topic that we must tread lightly when recruiting and we need to be respectful of grievers. We are depending on grief support group leaders who consent to our study to pass our survey link along to their members. Anna said that we received nearly 50 more responses from her outreach to online groups and it is so exciting to know that we have more data to work with. We were so worried about not having enough respondents.

Talking on the phone has never been one of my strong skills. I often feel nervous and overwhelmed when I am on the phone. Contacting grief support groups is such an important part of our study that talking on the phone is critical. I am still not super comfortable on the phone, but the few grief support leaders that I have spoken with were extremely friendly which helped to ease some of my anxiety. Calling began to feel for natural and I almost felt like a telemarketer. That also helped me to feel more comfortable since I was gaining more and more practice speaking with people or leaving efficient messages that did not involve me rambling on.

We did a lot of coding for the open responses that we received from our surveys. For this process we individually coded the responses with themes we felt were prevalent or important. We then came together to discuss our codes and come up with the codes we all felt were important. We also worked on organizing the themes into groups. I see the importance of coding the themes because our ultimate goal is to create a product for grievers to use throughout their grief journey to support them. We need to know the most important things that groups have pointed out when we go about prototyping and wire framing our ideas into an actual product.

This week I did my first peer review for the article that some of the other REU students are writing. It was interesting to read about their project since my project is very different. I feel that my partner and I have a different writing style than the article that I read this week so I had to read the article a couple of times to feel comfortable with their writing style. I hope that my feedback will be useful for the group that I reviewed. I feel that I gave a lot of nit-picky comments.

Our ultimate goal is to create a product that grievers can use as a resource to support them during their grieving journey. We are also considering adding a component for the loved ones of grievers so they may serve as additional support. Our product will be a result of the responses we receive from our online survey and in person interviews with the grievers and grief group leaders. In regard to results, we hope to have sufficient information to reveal some of the common themes related to grief and technology to see where we can further expand research in this field.

Meetings with our mentors has been difficult this past week.  James was only in the office for a little bit of time and we were not able to catch him to discuss our code book with him. Luckily, Patrick is back from his trip. We got to meet with him for a bit which was super helpful since he had some new insights about were we can guide questions for our follow-up interviews. Things are kind of at a standstill until we are able to meet with him. We are also in need of more participants for our study. Because of this Anna has us working on our html and css skills so that it will be easier for use come time to create our end product for grievers. Code Academy has been extremely helpful. We did meet with Anna multiple times a day, which is super helpful because it gives us a lot of guidance on what our priorities are for the time being.

Fun things from the past week:

At home my mom and I foster kittens from our local shelter. My brother sent me a snap chat of our three foster kittens and I instantly fell in love with them. These are barn babies so we are housing them until they are old enough to be spayed/neutered. Then they will go back to their barn. Sadly, they are not very friendly because they are not used to humans, but they are pretty darn cute.

The Barn Babies

On Friday (6/9) we had a baking party at our apartment with some of the other ProHealth and SROC students to make some desserts for the cookout we had on Saturday. It was a lot of fun because I have not made desserts in a long time. We made avalanche bark, chocolate caramel pretzel bark, rice krispie treats, lucky charm treats, snickerdoodle cookies, and mint brownies.

the chocolate caramel pretzel bark

On Saturday (6/10) we went to the cookout at Katie’s and it was really fun. I love babies and little kids so I was in cuteness overload. I also had some nice animal therapy since Katie’s dog was there. Ginger reminds me of a blonde version of my dog George.

I reached out the the Monroe County Human Shelter and I am hopeful that they will get back to me so that I can volunteer and interact with the cats.

Ginger

George (feat. Stanley)

I dislike walking so I bought a bike.

Pictures of animals from my walks to work:

 a baby bunny

a blue jay (don’t mind my poor photography skills)

more bunnies!