“Everything’s going so well!” (Harold Zidler, Moulin Rouge!) and then it went pear-shaped.
Unlike Zidler, I know that this feeling is probably short-lived and recognise that eventually things will probably turn to custard. I can live with that.
Having spent nearly the last 1 1/2 years, sitting in my office reading with little or no contact with people outside the university, I have finally started interviewing. Well it turns out that talking to people absolutely rocks and I may actually be enjoying my research now that I am interviewing. Who could have predicted that the thing that would save my research study was researching? (paraphrase – Michael Scott, The Office).
What a crazy world 
So, I guess this is day 2 and I am preparing for interviews next week. Besides scheduling appointments in my diary, I decided I should also dust off the interview questions and check them against my theoretical framework and research questions. I mean even though I am looking forward to getting out there for a chat with participants, I really don’t want to discover 6 months from now that I didn’t ask the right questions. Well, it isn’t quite as easy as I thought to ensure that I am asking the right questions and now I wish that I had started this a month ago and not a few days before interviews begin. Unfortunately, here I am and I’ll just need to make do. Maybe these first interviews will be my pilot? I guess this is a bit research ala Macgyver. Now what did I do with the duct tape and chewing gum?
For heaps of reasons in general (like my computer just crashed), but specifically because I have started scheduling interviews for my research (ethics approval pending) and since I am studying social media use it seemed reasonable to communicate via social media. Well, I am connected to some participants in Facebook so I thought I’d try to send messages within Facebook instead of email. I don’t use the “send message” functionality much, but it crashed 8 times while I was trying to send 4 messages. I am still not sure if they finally went through so I ended up using Twitter to contact everybody. Not the best privacy-wise, but at least it works. Hmmm… wonder if I should rethink my research position….?
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