Getting the ball rolling

 It's the first week of term and I'm sat here trying to get my brain to slow down and start actually comprehending everything that needs to be done over the next 12 weeks. I had my first 1-2-1 with my new supervisor Pedro on Monday and am glad I have all my initial admin questions ironed out. We started our conversation introducing ourselves and basically going over the ideas behind my inquiry, what inspired it and where I am in terms of preparations for this term and my study plan. 

My first question was to clear up the confusion within my module peer group over the participant ID codes that must be listed on each participant information sheet as we were unsure if we made them up or were given them but I confirmed that they are just made up for the purpose of anonymisation. 

I wanted to clarify the structure and layout of the report and in particular the length of the literature review. The way the report is described in the handbook, each type of information is presented separately and only discussed in context with each other in the analysis section. Since the literature reviews from both this term and last term form the basis of my foundational knowledge on my inquiry topic, they will play a large role in informing the questions I ask in my interviews and it seemed odd to me how disjointed the report will be if formatted in this way. Pedro and I discussed that the literature review should be relatively short and very much describing what has been said to present the information rather than having any kind of narrative and that the information discussed would then be contextualised and discussed in more depth in the analysis section. He suggested that it may be possible to intertwine the sections more to make the report more fluid but that this could cause problems in terms of feedback since only certain sections are reviewed for feedback prior to the final submission. 

Lastly we briefly discussed my proposed interview questions which I have now sent to him for approval. I found it quite hard to figure out what to ask in my interviews. I ended up going back to my proposal from module 2 and going through each of my aims asking myself questions like  "what do I actually want to find out?" "what questions came up in my initial research that could be answered in my interviews?" " what can I ask that will give me a broader overview of differing perspectives surrounding my area of inquiry". I finished that process with around 8 questions for each different category of participants. Pedro reminded me that since these are semi-structured interviews it should be expected that the questions asked will probably change from interview to interview as my breadth of knowledge expands and a participant may answer a later question in response to an earlier one.  I guess the important thing to note is that even though we do have to get our questions signed off they are more of a guide to ensure everything gets covered as opposed to a strict script.

Wishing everyone the best of luck for the start of the new term! x