Everything has slowed down…..but is now speeding up again! (hopefully)

What a week I have had!! I have been writing up transcripts which I had forgotten take forever to do and I hate doing them!!! Why did I choose to do an empirical study?! And if one person tells me how many words they have written I am either going to cry or punch them! Although I feel on track apart from the hiccup this week that could not be helped but that has delayed an observation that I wanted to be completed by now. One of the children in which I was looking to observe decided to get the chicken pox and no one could help these circumstances but I did feel slightly angry about it at the end of last week. However, I have spoken to the parents yesterday and although she still has some spots on her back and tummy, I will be able to carry out the observation on Wednesday! So things are looking up again!

Seriously though could anything else go wrong in my final year?! It is not a lucky year for me!!! Yet, I have developed my observations to having the children draw pictures of bodies and then from here I can analyse them intellectually through previous work that has been carried out before. Keep smiling Jo!!! The hard work is nearly over and you bring everything together! Please agree with me Clive!!

Where I am at.....

This entry is to not only let Clive know where I stand in my process, but also lets me make sense of what I have been doing the last week!!!! I am just at the start of my reading week and over the past few days I have been speaking and meeting with the children and their parents to see when I am able to carry out my observations. Both parents have agreed and I have their consent to observe their children and record the data in whatever way I find most suitable and beneficial to my study.

I have decided that I will be video recording the children when carrying out the 'strange situation' and will have a digital recorder present when performing the intellectual tests. Here, I will be able to transcribe the intellectual observations and place them all as raw data in my appendix. I would also like to make use of still pictures to show siginifcant moments in the 'strange situation' and to highlight to the reader in a visual context these points. All of this equipment is available to me through the Student Media Services and I have been in talks with Howard about the use and availability! I am in the process of using a digital recorder, it is a new piece of equpiment that is being used to try and replace the old tape recorders. I have to be honest, it looks pretty high-tech and very cool!!!! Yet, Howard ensures me that it is easy to use and if I have any trouble with any of the equipment to just phone him! Such a nice man! The process that I am carrying out now on the digital recorder will allow me to be fully confident when I come to use it for my dissertation! This, fingers crossed, will be happening in the next week!

I am having to go home on Thursday for family reasons and I do have to carry out an interview on my younger sister for another assignment (yes I will be using the digital recorder!!!) But I will be back up on Sunday and by the end of next week, I hope to have all my data collected!!! Ahhh!!!

I have also decided that I will be carrying out an interview on my mother. I want it to be only informal and it may happen that I do not even use it in my final piece, but it will be about my own experience of my up-bringing and how I reacted to mother-child seperation. As I was so young, obviously I do not remember if I was 'clingy' towards my mother or quite happy to be placed in unfamiliar surroundings. For my own personal knowledge, I would like to carry out this interview and also it may fit in nicely around the topic that I am looking into! Also I get to use the digital recorder again!!!

Children at home and in Day Care (full reference later on)

Raises questions about the "effects of these alternate environments" outside of the home. Although most day care and nursery centres are not connotated as being rough, many people do fear "that being in day care will harm children." (2) Yet, within this book day care is being discussed and described as any other care for children that is not carried out by immediate family i.e parents and grandparents. Therefore, here the term day care can be associated with babysitters, other people/carers entering the family home.
Stewart et al highlights some of the funding questions surrounding this topic; "what is the nature of the attention received from their care givers in day care? what is the significance of their daily seperations from their mother?

N.B This ties into my investigation and co-insides with many questions that I have on the subject. Specfically when looking into the intellectual development

(3) "What aspects of the day-care environment are critical for providing such stimulation of development? Can children be given enough stimulation to ensure their intellectual development/growth in a day-care facility with a large group of children and few-care givers or in a home care arrangement with a disinterested caregiver?

Methodology (31)
The study is carried out through two parts; intense observations at different points of the day 'you' want it to be as realistic as possible as many studies "simply visit families when it is convenient for the parents". This does not allow for the researcher to gain valid and reliable evidence as the situation is false. Second part involves interviews with both parents and caregivers. The data from the observations was collected through utterances being recoreded from the adult to the child and vice versa.

Notes on Making Meaning from Data

How are we going to display our data in a way that highlights the meanings we have found, so that our audience can engage with it effectively.

Methodology, Epistimology and Ontology

Ontology: the way you think (your beliefs about the world). Your place in the world is affecting your methods that you choose.

These will be guided by: Interviews

• I believe that people tell the truth
• I assume they will not tell lies
• This is my understanding of how the world works
• Nature of truth

Questions to consider:

• What is your research question?
• What are your methodological learnings? Interpretivistic? Positivistic?

N.B Neil Carey in 1st year - Reading and Researching Communication

• What procedures/methods/strategies have you adpoted for collecting the data which will inform your study?
• Have these procedures/methods been influenced by your proposed analytical methods?
• How will you represent that data?

Preparing for analysis

Make sure your data is an easy accessible form:

Quantative data: The number of people I selected for interviews (in my case observations). The number of themes I have generated and then think about how to display these themes. For example Microsoft Excel, input data and then go to insert and select; from here you can choose from a bar or a pie chart. Even think about making charts for the pre-data, data collected before the observation;

Sex - Male/Female

Age - Consider date of birth/years/age category

Family background/history

Summarise your statistics (keep raw data in appendix) With themes, note down the differences (variability). You then need to interpret these differences, why do they exist? what significance do they have for answering your initial research questions. (Frequency counts, thematic analysis, numerical results).

Qualitative data analysis - Interview transcripts, how do we interpret this data? See link on WebCT

General points to consider:

1. Reduce and Organise
2. Edit
3. Summarise
4. Code
5. Note
6. Conceptualise (try to see the bigger picture, this shows what happens)
7. Display
8. Interpret (how much of the transcript will you use?)
9. Think about how I am going to display my data (graphs, charts, transcripts)

Need a plausible ending, do not just say it's true, valid and reliable. Has it done/attempted to set out what you set out to do?

Meeting with Clive

I have had a breakthrough!!! This breakthrough happened awhile ago but because my Internet at home has been rubbish, this is the first time I have been able to write about it!! I feel like I know where I am going with my dissertation finally and this is where my focus will lie. I have shifted through material and have changed my ideas everytime I have read something but now I feel confident that I have something that could really work, I just need to tell Clive!

I was scared before going into see Clive, yet I am not exactly sure why! I think it was because I as aware that he may not like my ideas, he may not give me consent to run my ideas and the thought that this could happen was scary! However, I felt the meeting went really well and I came out feeling extremely positive and ready to press forward.

The focus now lays in looking at children who have been kept at home in the early stages of their lives or have been placed in day care/nurseries. I am not looking to state that one option is better or more beneficial for the child but rather add to the on-going debate that is discussed in most of the relevant literature. I will be contributing to the debate by carrying out observations on two children that I am able to gain access to, these observations will consist of an intellectual test to see how well the child is developing and also an observation known as 'the strange situation' which will be explained further in my final piece but it consists of the mother placing the child in a room with unfamiliar toys and an unfamiliar person, and observing how the child reats to the surroundings, the 'stranger' and then how the child reacts once the mother returns.

I briefly explained this observation to Clive and we begun to dicuss the idea and connotations of the term 'experiment' and how, for me the thought of carrying out an experiment on children disgusted me slightly as it made me think of the children as lab rats/guniea pigs rather than human beings. We were both interested into why I thought this and this is something that I would like to pursue, therefore I will be carrying out research on the term 'experiment' and also researching into my own thoughts and feelings.

I also need to gain consent off the parents of the children and I am wanting to observe due to ethics that are concerned when dealing with children. I already have my ethics form and now just need to approach the parents.

I placed forward the idea to Clive that I want to include a section or involve my mother in my final piece of my dissertation. She has played a large role and has had a big affect on my University life and the way in which my dissertation is forming, Clive agreed with me and I will be writing a type of autobiography about my mother and I, which I have already started to do and there are pieces of literature that I have also found that help highlight and represent what my mother means to me.

Finally in the next two to three weeks, I will be gathering my data and then deciding how to represent this in my final piece. As well as asking myself how I will analyse and interpret the data that I receive for it to be made clear to my reader.