Have you stopped yet to overthink about this whole mess and ask, individually, what even are we? We, who are not sick, may never get sick, but who nonetheless are practicing social distance in the interest of others? We might never be quarantined and yet we are an active participant, lacking any communal context for […]
My content analysis goes slowly, but I got a boost when I decided to update my coding sheets and go ahead and record the data from the first 10 chapters. Up to this point, I’ve been focused primarily on secondary data, meaning that someone else conducted research and then shared their data with the public […]
To earn many Master’s degrees and (probably) all PhDs, students must demonstrate what they have learned by performing and analyzing original research. This is the thesis or dissertation (usage varies by university, but my school and most others use “thesis” for Master’s, “dissertation” for PhD). Beyond the skills of theory, literature review, methodology, and analysis […]
I’ve finally developed a content analysis model I like for my literature sidequest, but implementing it has been an education of its own. I’ve never fully gained control of my reading speeds: I have slow and extremely focused or I have quick skimming. I’ll retain the slow approach well, but if I stop to take […]
I got sidetracked for a while, finishing old assignments, dealing with some household stuff. I find it’s easy to get back to it once I’m sitting at the desk, but THAT is the challenge. Getting in position. Making time, pulling myself away from other things. My current estimate is that it takes me 2x as […]
— and yes, there has to be a process —
The goal of graduate school is not to learn everything there is to learn about a field; indeed, the breadth of anything warranting the term “field” should be far too deep, and when you add in the hyperspecialization researchers and educators are expected to develop there’s simply too much for any one mind to handle. […]
Two quick notes for future contemplation (then the inevitable tangents): The sheer joy I feel in organizing a segment of thesis, only to slash it away into a separate document for future development, tells me everything I need about whether research is a good direction for my life. It wasn’t until I was working on […]
The last few sessions, every time I sit down to my thesis, I have felt invigorated, enlivened by the topic and the contribution I hope to make. Today started out much the same, but after a few hours of just moving around tidbits and half-citations, it’s starting to set in just how much of an […]
I’ve only conducted one other interview in graduate school. Although I think I did a great job with the interview itself, I was trying to shoehorn a lot into a theory class whose scope should have been much more precise. This is part of why I don’t think I’m good at theory. I can’t focus […]
Theories of Care 