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