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