Hello everyone!
Researching this summer allows for flexibility in my schedule to allow for plenty of camping, swimming, and fishing on my end and I hope your summer is filled with warm and relaxing activities, too! Taking time during the summer for relaxation and mindfulness, in my opinion, is just as important as the research project itself.
Turns out we are finding it slightly more difficult to get college students to participate in research over the summer than expected. I can’t say I can blame them, as the summer is a student’s chance to relax and get away from academia. For this reason, we have had to become a bit more creative in our recruitment. We started using some university department based newsletters to put up postings for participants. This has yielded much more results than simply working with the universities Gender and Sexuality Resource centers. Based off my mentor and I’s initial projections, we wanted to have the majority of interviews scheduled and completed in July. That being said, we have been able to identity a few participants. Our first interview was done last week, and went great. It was actually shorter than expected. We also have another scheduled for next week. Ideally, we can get one more interview scheduled for the remainder of July and do at minimum, three more in August.
At this time, I am beginning to transcribe the first interview. It is a process that makes me wish I learned the correct way to type when I was in middle school! Either way, progress is great. It is exciting to start pulling themes out of the initial interview transcription that are forming the basis for this research project. Some themes that have been identified so far include religion, socioeconomic status, friendships, and public vs. parochial schools.
Next, we wait until completing and transcribing a few more interviews at which time we can begin to identify themes (if any) that exist between more than one interview. Following that, we will begin compiling all data, which we will then use to make a poster presentation so we can share our research findings at various different conferences. Finally hearing back from multiple potential participants has been the most uplifting part of the project so far. At times, it was difficult to stay engaged when we were not hearing back- though that did allow us more time for reviewing relevant literature. I look forward to having more to share with you all in August!
