Overview of My Work This Week:
This week, I created a schedule of research for myself to follow and began writing my paper. I spent the last two weeks reading and outlining, so it was important for me to begin writing the paper rather than just notes, as I have been doing while gathering background information. I also began looking for databases where I could find population, income, GDP, and gender data as well as places to find pieces of legislation in South Korea and Japan.
Future Plans:
I plan on completing the first part of my project, focused on legislation, by Wednesday this week. The following week, I will complete the second part, which will be focused on nursing homes. Finally, I will update my data, edit my paper, then complete my research poster the following week.
Accomplishments and Goals:
I utilized Lau's catalog of digital and physical resources to find texts that would help me in my research. I also requested and received interlibrary loans from GW and American Univerisity. This was an important step for me to be able to organize and begin the literature review portion of my research.
I also had several meetings with my faculty mentor, with another one scheduled for this coming Friday. We created a system that would work for both of us. We have weekly meetings and I send the work I have completed for that week at least 48 hours before our meeting over Zoom. This way, we both have plenty of time to produce new work and review it.
Finally, I have begun writing my paper. I created a new outline for the modified project and have been working on filling in the outline. I also created a schedule for myself to follow to ensure that I have plenty of time to both polish my paper and create a research poster based on the paper I wrote.
Challenges:
One challenge I faced while conducting my research was narrowing down my research topic. During our first meeting, my research mentor and I agreed that my topic was too ambitious to fully research within six weeks. Thus, I had to spend a week conducting more background reading and research to select the area to focus on.
Another challenge I faced was finding the countries that I would focus on. I eventually settled on Japan and South Korea due to their proximity, similar cultures due to shared histories, and the fact that they are in different phases of aging populations.