Probably the longest break in this whole project.....

So things have moved on. I have now written a first draft of my methodology. I'm pretty happy with this. I've also made inroads into my literature review (about 4k)... so if my maths is correct i'm at about 20k and am aiming for about 70. Almoooost a third done (at a push). I've also counted up how many qualitative interview i've done and there are about 12 that are long enough to be of use. i would like more but am starting to feel that there's probably enough if need be. I think up until december i will put a concerted effort into meeting people and asking them there views but after that call it a day.

so.. since my last post i have begun counselling again and have also completed most of my work towards getting chartered by the bps. both of these developments have taken up a lot of time and hopefully will calm down from now on - although i now cnsistently have 2 mornings a week taken up by my practice.

I'm trying desparately trying to work out what to write that would be useful. One interesting thing today is that those young people who have said hello have all been people i have met before. they have popped by to say hi and generally to say they are having difficulty reaching someone. this is nice and extends some of my interviews (reinforcing the temporal interview idea). i think there's also something in the way that the individuals felt comfortable contacting me again.. maybe a parallel to therapy.. maybe... the downside for me was it was hard to rem that i had met with them and it was only when i was saving the transcript that i noticed... mmm something to ponder.

see you in about 8 months!!

arseholes

now i can't elaborate too much about the title of this posting - just in case someone actually decides to visit this site but there are a lot of arseholes in the counselling world. I suppose it's a bit of an occupational hazard being a lecturer in counselling but i just don't get it.

you know you read stuff about untrained people being to offer as an effective service as others who have received training and... well that's not really a surprise. Generally there seems to be something fundamental about being able to create a relationship with people and .... well ... be nice to others. I'm sure this is bound up in a load of cultural assumptions... and that probably i'm denying something or some other theotical stuff that i'm not paying enough attention but i struggle with it.

More specifically i struggle with ernestness and preciousness - sometimes masquerading as professionalism. Or power trips and self righteousness ... oh i'll stop ranting.

Things that have happened since i last posted. well i've got no idea when i last posted so i'm sure it's a lot. Mostly dominated by arthur geting bigger but with some counselling content. Plotted highlights include:

- getting a book deal and signing a contract with sage to put some words down on paper
- getting my feedback from the bps - this seemed incredibly inconsistent!!! and lacking in parity with my knowledge of other assessments - but who am i to question...
- presently i'm awaiting to hear about my challenges to the bps's feedback - singers crossed on that one
- i have looked into getting a placement again and had an interview with the student counselling service. this seemed to go pretty badly to me but it was fun to reflect on practice a little more - i felt that i kinda said 'well i'm only doing it because i have to and well i don't really feel that counselling is that useful after all'. Which is obviously true to some degree but not completely. I thik it would be interesting to get back into being a counsellor/therapist/counselling psychologist but it's a strange world!!! On the interview side of things i'll keep my fingers crossed too but again i feel it's a little unlikely really
- i begun writing up my phd a few weeks back too - this seems like the most positive happening really. i seem to have stopped for a while but after this hol (which i may not have mentionned i'm on) i'll get right back to it - honestly :)

back to singing nursery rhymes and banging things with bells in

mid interview

ok - so i'm clearly interviewing someone who is chatting to other people. I thought i'd have a go at multi-tasking too. part of me thinks it's probably unethical, but with miutes in between each response it doesn't seem a great deal different than interviewing people using email. Kinda like we both know the score so it's ok? or at least that's wot i'm reading into things.

i seem to be generating loads of little pools of data at the mo - the quan stuff is ticking over but the qual suff is coming realtively slowly. it's difficult to grapple with as it consists of so many fragments. Seems to echo the power issues that go on in therapy online - ie i have to wait for people to contact me, they can choose not to turn up, they can dissapear or take ages to respond to messages that i send. i would say it's frustrating, but it's not really. the frustrations more about my eagreness to get stuff and 'make progress' and i'm not actually sure where i'm progressing at the mo - which seems to be a good place.

AHHH!!!! somehow i've just ended the interview and clicked back before saving the data!!!! am now logging off very annoyed at myself and writing an overview before i forget!!!

developing relationships

Ok - i've just had a posting delete itself - bugger

but i want to capture some of today's expereince so i'll babble some more with the hope of capturing some of it..... firstly i am waiting.... listening to music and waiting to see if anyone wants to chat to me about the counselling service. There isn't really enough space on the screen to hold as many windows open as i've got but, it's working (well aprat from it being to blame for losing the last posting - mmm).

Anyhow i ust chatted to someone who noted that the service was a lifeline. This is becoming a common storyline. Also I'm getting fasicnated by the ongoing relationships i'm having with people. Although i anticipated the interviews would parallel the therapeutic process to some degree, I hadn't thought that this would mean they would spread over weeks. It's interesting that i'm getting people contact me more than once and know who i am on the site. Today i was welcomed with "hi you're the student aren't you". This seems great in several ways:

a) it means that people know what i am doing in advance - i was slightly worried that people wouldn't read my profile but comments like this mean that my motives are transparent and people say hello knowing i'm not a counsellor on the site!!!

b) the ongoing relationships mean i can follow up with more questions as they develop - great for filling out the stories that i'm getting

that'll do - no-one has come yet but i don't want to lose another posting........ no doubt to be continued

a month or two goes by

Babies occupy a lot of your time. However, there would still be plenty of time to get on and do other things in life if it wasn't for the bloody muppets in call centres who keep taking you details and messing things up. I would list all the ones that have just been incompetent gits but it would take even more time so i'm not going to.

SO the phd - well it's happening. But so are a lot of other things. I've just been online interviewing people about using the counselling service, but again it was quite difficult to get a useful interview - HOWEVER again i think a lot of this proves really useful paralells to the counselling process. For instance the person i met today was contacting the service from work. She found it difficult to access it elsewhere and there weren't any face-to-face services available for her to use at the mo. This made it quite difficult to keep a conversation going, but not impossible. It makes me wonder about the differnces between free to access services and ones that people pay for privately - rekindled thoughts from working face-to-face with young people as a counsellor. I kinda feel that i should clarify that i don't see that as a bad thing but one that needs to be worked with.
This is the first week that i've tried to do any interviewing for ages!!! so that's not too good, but it's i still feel on top of the phd - i need to start writing - and for practice i've got 2 articles that i'm trying to complete - one is a very short article about kooth while the other is about online methods. I think that i'll actually enjoy writing the phd stuff more than the articles as i can see the point of the phd stuff at the moment - obviously i see the point of the articles (after all i'd at least like to have a few things from 2007 on my CV when i become a doctor :)). Where was i going - nowhere probably....

lets start somewhere else - i'm off to dublin in a few months - i've been invited to take part in an online conselling thing that's looking at putting in some funding applications to carry on research projects http://www.esfworkshop.eu/- it all looks very interesting. Also i seem to have ended up getting involved in the development of some virtual learning environments at the university but i have no idea what that means yet.

Mixed methods and pretty pictures seems to be the way forward - i'll start them just as soon as i've got the bastard window replaced in the kitchen

phishing

OK phishing is generally a bad thing and generally refering to where annoying bastards try to scam gullible folk of their hard in money. HOWEVER it's also a term that seems to fit what i've been doing in research terms this week - although maybe not actually - for all sorts of reasons it's probably better to describe it as something else.

So what do i mean in this case - basically i've been opening up random chat rooms with the hope that young people based on the counselling site pop by for and tell me about their experience of using the site. This technique echoes what was done in the kidshelpline study last year and proved productive in taking advantage of the fact that the users of the site are generally happy to have a chat with someone while they wait to meet a counsellor/supporter.

So far this appears to have been a really positive experience and i've already had at least one more useful interview with a user of the site. Unfortuntaely a technical problem meant that one interviewee got lost - which was needless to say a bit of a pain but in many ways parallels the experience of counselling in this medium. It notably also come up in a recent organisational meeting of counsellors working on the site. In other instances people popped into the chat room and said hello and then headed off. This may have been because i said something along the line sof 'I'm not a counsellor, I'm a researcher trying to find out what young people think of the site - would you mind answering a few questions' - this could therefore scare people off - a feeling that i can simpify with when you get accosted in the street with the 'can i just ask you a few questions' question!!!!

The interviews themselves were again very brief - again this may have been quickened by the fact that i wasn't providing the service that they had accessed the site for (here i note that it does explicitly say that i'm a researcher on my publicly available profile but not everyone reads that). Despite this i still feel that the interviews will be really useful - my questions still seem to revolve around how do i get at the stuff about depth of relationship - particularly when the interviews are relatively brief and don't develop deep relationships wioth those taking part - mmm - something else to ponder.

Also this week i've spent a lot of time inputting sdq scores which has been really interesting (i say this with surprise). The results seem interesting in that they suggest that the people accessing the service are young people who fall out of the norms that the sdq suggests. It also suggests that in 6 weeks of using the site it doens't show a significant improvement for the users - but i guess this isn't a surprise as you can't undo years of peoples lives in 6 weeks. Anyhow i have a steep statistical learning curve ahead of me - not sure where my knowledge went on the subject but it seems to only be a faint glimmer in the distance at the mo!!!!

for now more sleepless nights of baby crying and hazy daytimes

a new year

Well little arthur was born on the 17th of decemebr and this has kinda put things on hold for a while.

although i say this and things are still ticking over nicely. There have now been about 100 sdqs completed and from the last look about 30 follow up sdqs which should prove pretty useful. I've also had about 40 of the alliance quetionnaires completed. Now al i need to do is to work out how to analyse the whole thing - fun fun fun. I'm presently putting together a huge excel spreadsheet ready for playing about with using some fancy stats package that i don't fully understand but should get something meaningful from.

I have also conducted 1 interview that warrants some word as it was a really strange experience. I think it was really noticeable how much less is communicated through the written word than f2f. Although this is obvious and something i've been working with for a long time, i couldn't help but think there was a lot that i wasn't getting. it may have been that the contact wasn't long enough, but it wouldn't really be possible to get y/p to commit to multiple interviews of over an hour of length. It may however have been my interview style - to start with i have been pretty open with a slight focus based upon the different elements of working alliance theory - goal, task and bond. It makes me wonder if the bond bit may be the hard bit, but again i wonder if it's just my lack of expereince of doing what i'm doing where i'm doing it - mmmm - ie online interviewing. I have my second interview in 40 mins so maybe i will have more of an idea then.

Also trying to organise interviews has reminded me of working with young people. I have found it hard to contact some and had a dna that told very close to the time we were about to meet. In fact i waited for 40mins and then checked my messages and the cancellation was there. This obviously isn't a problem but it reminds me that what i am doing has lots of paralel processes with what i am investigating.

Anyhow - by the end of this year i hope to have considerably progressed in this work!!! i intend to have begun writing up and to have collected all the data that is necessary for a phd - so far this looks as tho it's not going to be a problem at all. The other element of the project is that i have been pretty slack in keeping the org themselves up to date with my work - i plan on getting a report to them asap (it was meant to appear in dec but arthur distracted me good and proper from that) - i'm aiming for the end of jan in my mind now - poss sooner dependent upon how the data inputting goes!!!!

Happy new year to everyone who passes by

Terry