Saturday 31 January 2009

A long week!

Its Saturday at the end of what has felt like a very long week. I spent some time house and dog sitting this week. No internet access so time again for lots of reading with brief spurts of dog walking activity. I have mainly focused my reading around the various articles I had picked up online the week before and the theses sent to me by a couple of people via the online networks I joined.Some very interesting reading that has taken my thoughts in a number of directions. This afternoon I am having some time to try and organise the last week into some kind of meaningful and logical notes.

I feel much more confident now about being able to justify the use of social networks to generate my sample. The literature is also available to support this approach. Reading Jody Mellor's (University of York 2007) thesis around Muslim and Non Muslim women in university gave me confidence in this also as she used social networking to generate a proportion of her sample too.

So another week in and I feel that I have a plan (albeit a sketchy plan but at least its there in my head).

I have approximately 16 people interested in participating in the interviews most of which have identified themselves through online networks or via snowballing of their contacts.

I am clear that I want to use a narrative approach based on Wengraphs work with a two stage lightly structured interview and a follow up third stage using online contact.

I have framed a question to elicit the narrative and have begun to identify the ethical considerations to prepare me for Faculty ethics approval.

Onwards to next week where my goal is to try and write some of this up into a logical and meaningful piece. I also want to keep my focus around the methodology as I attempt to prepare the necessary paperwork for ethics approval.

Nicky

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