I am about to leave for my four-month fieldwork in Japan. All the preparation – recruiting research participants, preparing ethics statements and consent forms, and confirming research locations – is done. But there is still some preparation to be done for the conducting of focus groups of patients, which will provide supplemental data in the […]
Read more "Week 52: The last week of 2017"
My research workload was small in Week 51. I spent most of the time contacting research participants, shopping for Christmas stuff and cleaning the kitchen, dining space and bathroom. On Tuesday, my supervisor invited me to lunch. It was a pleasure to have a nice farewell lunch with her before my departure for fieldwork. In […]
Read more "Week 51: Our first Christmas together"
I attended Christmas socials at my school and enjoyed having a chat with PhD colleagues whom I had not had an opportunity to talk to. We discussed our research methods and shared some concerns about analysis over drinks. It was very useful to exchange our thoughts and experiences of research life. Some of the participants […]
Read more "Week 50: Christmas socials"One of the research participants suggested I increase the font size of the consent forms to make them easier to read. I changed the size from 11 pt to 12-14 pt and the line spacing from single to 1.2. I had used the original format, but academic documents tend to be written in small text […]
Read more "Week 49: Paperwork and social"
It is hard to believe that December is already upon us, with the end of the year just ahead. How quickly time passes. This week, I had the last supervision meeting of 2017 and gained much advice on how I should prepare for my fieldwork, observations and focus groups. (I ended up including focus groups […]
Read more "Week 48: The last meeting before departure"