As I reach the end of week 2 of my Laidlaw research, I want to look back at what has been a somewhat challenging week delving into qualitative analysis. Although challenging it was also immensely rewarding .

The change.

My Mondays always start with a weekly check in with my weekly supervisor, this week it was really positive as I had not only reached but surpassed my weekly goal. It’s always nice for this to be validated by others.

However alongside a new weekly target of defining my qualitative word dictionaries and to complete my lexical analysis on Scottish manifestos, Dr Umit asked me to consider the various different angles I could further take in my research project.

I initially felt disheartened as I thought I had my research plan set in stone. But upon reflection I realised that this was just more opportunity to ensure my research ultimately has the most amount of impact possible and is an opportunity in a leadership capacity to always be ready to change and adapt.

i ultimately ended up spending the rest of Monday dwelling over my options and making a decision.  I decided I was going to look at not only the frequency that youth policy appears on party platforms I.e. manifestos post votes at 16 versus before, but look at a relatively new area of research in comparative politics called group appeals.

As such my research will not only look at the frequency that youth policy is prioritised but if there are any shifts in policy areas, through devising four categories e.g. Education & youth work, Employment & Housing, Health & Wellbeing and Community, Civic Participation & Justice. This will hopefully help investigate not only if but how political parties respond, when young people become a legitimate actor. 

Mid week training.

Tuesday was a Laidlaw research training day, in which we learnt how to use techniques to work with various stakeholders during research to determine their views through ranking different statements 1-9 in a diamond formation. We debated in groups what were the most important elements of research. I personally found it really insightful seeing the difference perspectives, I.e. the debate between community impact, innovative research and methodological rigour. It was also insightful hearing how creative research can be in conducting quantitative studies.

 The day finished off with a workshop on writing reflections from a Durham Laidlaw alumni, something which I learned a lot about and I hope this is reflected in this blog, as I learned about different reflection techniques and methods.

The Challenge. 

However the challenges came on Wednesday, Thursday & Friday, after never having done qualitative lexical and thematic analysis before, and getting access to a software suite, Nvivo from the university. A piece of software I was unsure how to use.

To sum it up it wasn’t so much research as experimenting, and failing over and over again, including re doing all the progress I had made after the software corrupted my project after a crash.  And realising as a Mac user that I needed the windows version due to a lack of complete feature set on Mac, on a Friday morning.

I have to be honest I was in Trevelyan college library at Midnight on Thursday thinking should I just give up? what a horrible project idea etc, in hindsight I should have went to my research supervisor for help.

But as someone who has always had the mindset of I’ll fix it myself?, I powered on and had successfully completed there lexical analysis by end of day Friday.

I learned from this that resilience is key, and that failure is opportunity. It felt so immensely rewarding eventually figuring it out through trial and error and as a side effect I understand the Nvivo software package far better now as a result of this.