The last two weeks of the project have been challenging but also rewarding nevertheless. We have moved on from our literature review to determining our research methodology, mapping stakeholders, designing our tools for primary data collection from these stakeholders and contacting these stakeholders to organise interviews during the upcoming week.

Determining our research methodology required us to refine our research objectives even more and to really clarify what we meant by them. We identified 5 areas of enquiry that we were interested in collecting data on, and this was really useful – it focussed our selection of stakeholders and aided us in designing effective topic guides that contained incisive questions directed towards these areas of enquiry.

Mapping the stakeholders was an interesting process, and further helped to reassure me regarding my uncertainty about my ability to tackle this project. Once we knew which criteria we were using to sample stakeholders and which stakeholders we wanted to contact, the task ahead became much more concrete. This meant that I was able to formulate clearer plans for the weeks ahead, assuaging some of my stress.

Designing tools for primary data collection was substantially more difficult, however. I’ve learned that there is a particular style of asking questions to effectively get data from semi-structured interviews, and it was admittedly slightly fatiguing to keep writing new questions only to be told that their phrasing wasn’t ideal. Additionally, we had originally drafted a topic guide for each different stakeholder type, but we realised that this would not allow for effective triangulation – we therefore categorised our stakeholders into two broad denominations instead, and created a different topic guide for each of these denominations.

In addition to this, the extent to which everything has to be focussed in designing research stood out to me. This stands in contrast to the approach that my degree rewards – for PPE, casting a broad net and then selecting specifics within that broad net has been the approach that has worked best for me during my academic studies this past year. To the contrary, this research project has required refining a narrow set of tools and methodologies repeatedly to a sharp point, and this isn’t a process that I was overly familiar with.

I think I am enjoying this new challenge of research and I am certainly learning new valuable skills. The issue is that I haven’t done anything like this before, and it is quite strenuous and carries a lot of uncertainty. This means that this research is not very identity-affirming whatsoever. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel more like myself. That’s fine, because to only take part in activities that make me feel more like myself would be inherently conservative, only serving to reinforce my pre-existing skillset and conception of myself. That being said, I do wonder whether this particular kind of research, or even research in general, is something that I would truly enjoy in the future. I’m unsure as to whether it’s close enough to my pre-existing identity, interests and skills to help me grow as a person whilst also being fulfilling as identity-reinforcing.

I do feel somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming two weeks. Firstly we must move on now to collecting and analysing data. I feel confident about collecting the data – running the interviews and having a discussion doesn’t scare me in this moment because I am truly passionate about this initiative and this topic. Again, however, analysing the data through thematic coding will be strenuous and it’s not something that I’ve done anything close to before – this won’t be identity-affirming either, I believe.

On top of this, we want to get our first draft done by next Friday. Indeed, we have to do so, because we all become extremely busy during Freshers’ Week. This means that we have a limited time scale to write up our introduction, literature review, and methodology, whilst also carrying out interviews and analysing data, and then writing up our findings and conclusion. This is slightly problematic because I received an unexpected promotion this week at another society I’m involved in, and that now requires a lot of my time immediately – that work is something I’m also very passionate about, and it excites me.

Next week will, I fear, be a week of high stress and velocity. I don’t feel particularly excited for that, because it doesn’t feel very fulfilling vis-à-vis my identity. I am looking forward to writing the chapter, however – it’s always fun to carefully craft an essay. We also need to produce an academic poster, which shall also be interesting.

Ultimately, there have been highs and low during this past two weeks. I am unsure about whether this sociological kind of research truly excites me, but there might be something in the curiosity behind research that I enjoy. I think what bothers me is that I enjoy using my voice and expressing myself, and perhaps the day-to-day activities of this research aren’t engaging enough to overcome the fact that we only truly get to speak in the form of our final report at the end of this project.