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Week 52: The last week of 2017
I am about to leave for my 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 later… read more
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Week 51: Christmas socials Part 2
My research workload was small in Week 51. I spent most of my time contacting research participants, shopping for Christmas goods, and cleaning the kitchen, dining area, and bathroom. On Tuesday, my supervisor invited me to lunch. It was a pleasure to have a nice lunch with her before I departed for fieldwork. In our… read more
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Week 50: Christmas socials
I attended Christmas socials at my school and enjoyed chatting with colleagues I hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to. We discussed our research methods and shared some concerns about analysis over drinks. It was very helpful to exchange our thoughts and experiences of research life. Some of the participants in my research have helped… read more
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Week 49: Paperwork and social
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 14 pt and the line spacing from single to 1.2. I had used the original English format, but academic documents tend to be written in small… read more
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Week 48: The last meeting before departure
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 my last supervision meeting of 2017 and received much advice on how to prepare for my fieldwork, observations, and focus groups. (I ended up including focus groups in… read more
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Week 47: Methodological amendments
I made some methodological amendments to my research. I had planned to conduct interviews and focus groups for qualitative data collection, but decided not to include focus groups and to devote my fieldwork to observing and recording real-life clinical consultations. The main reason for this amendment is that my fieldwork must align with my participants’… read more
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Week 46: Feeling like I am rushing
I have tried to write for 2 hours a day, which has given me many ideas, enough to clarify the methodology section and to draft the outlines and some sections of Chapter 2. I also had a Skype meeting with a Japanese doctor to ask some technical questions about clinical practice. His responses to my… read more
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Week 45: Non-productive
I keep hitting a wall whenever I try to demonstrate that my methodology section aligns precisely with my research objectives. My supervisor has mentioned that this can be one of the greatest challenges for any researcher, and I am beginning to see why. Still, I must overcome before I begin the main data collection in… read more
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