Academic Life I

Having been away for about 6 months and working on my PhD for a good 5 months or so, it's come to my attention that I haven't really wrote anything about that process on here.

I came to ARCSHS with an idea to do research on young people and new communications technologies, looking at romantic and sexual development. It was an idea that I had put into a breif research proposal about a year before I arrived and hadn't looked at much since. So when I started, I had a lot of ground to cover and not a clue about where to start.

After a bit of mucking around in literature about technologies and some consultations with my supervisors I started to focus in more and more on literature around the internet and what's happening with people on it. After awhile I came to realize that I had narrowed in too much and the research questions I was considering from the literature where too small. So I changed my focus and started to bring sexuality into the mix. This helped me to clarify what it was that I wanted to look at. I started reading more about youth and romance and sexuality and became really interested in subcultures, and in particular binge drinking.

Again I took a step back and went back to reading about sexuality. I also started to ready some theory articles. The last few weeks I have been emerged in a particular article that has to do with agency and obesity. I've been working through the article, sentance by sentance, applying it to my own thinking and research interests. The theoretical framework of this particular article provides some really interesting parallels to where my own thinking has been, but it's a very complex and dense read so working through it and figuring out how the various nuances can be worked into my own project is a very consuming task that takes up a lot of time and mental energy.

In a similar vein, there's some really interesting work being done on sexual ethics education and young people here in Australia, in Sydney. I got a chance to hear a presentation on some of the results of this research and chat with the main researcher. So there is an opportunity there for me to link my own research up with some of what she's doing, which is really exciting but adds on a whole other level that I will need to work through and have only just begun to get into.

I met with my supervisors today to discuss the theory article I've been stuck into and they were really happy with how I'd progressed with it and thought it through on my own. Now they want me to start thinking about writing up my proposal and preparing for my panel presentation.

How the PhD process works is that the first 9-12 months is spent working on a literature review, familiarizing yourself with your area of interest, figuring out what your research questions will be, thinking about what types of methodology you want to use to best answer those questions. Then you write up a research proposal which is presented to the department at a panel discussion. The panel is an opportunity for everyone to hear about your research and ask you questions about it, to give you feedback on your thinking, and while it is an experience that produces a great deal of anxiety, within ARCSHS it is a very colleagial experience and you get a great deal of support and encouragement from the centre.

After your proposal has been accepted by the panel, you are granted candidature. Then you submit your ethics application to get clearance to actually do the research. This takes about 8 weeks to get approval, plus how ever many weeks between the panel and when you submit ethics. Once you have ethics approval, that data collection can begin.

In my case, what I am planning to do is a nation wide online survey of young people. So it will be largely a quantitative project, though my survey will include a number of open ended questions that won't be quantifiable (meaning, I won't do statistical analyses on them but will look for common themes in the responses and explore what is said, and what is not said, in them).

After, and partially during, the data collection phase comes the data analysis and the actual writing up of the PhD. This happens during the 3rd year. Then once everything is written up, analyzed and put together in a satisfactory manner (there's a lot more in that than that) you submit and your PhD is marked.

So there you have it. I'm about 5 months in and am at the point where I have to start considering what I want to say in my actual research proposal. The aim is to have my panel presentation in early November, which I think is a bit of a lofty goal, but it does give me a deadline and a goal to orient my activity around, and I work well within that kind of a parameter. It's exciting and nerve wracking, but here I am, doing what I've wanted to do for so long, in an incredibly supportive environment. What more can you ask for?