One step forward...

And the inevitable two steps back. Or, one hour work of work and then two off, wandering around the house looking for urgent, time-consuming missions...

Yes, today is not going well. I work well for a few days, think I have cracked it and got some momentum and motivation going and then bam. My brain wants to shut down and throw it all out of the window. Oh well. I did finally sit down to read through my notes and basically just stared at them and turned pieces of paper over. After washing up and making some much-needed houmous I realised that I should have a look at any work I have done so far on the methodology as I knew I had a couple of 'rough' drafts I knocked up for various pre-fieldwork meetings. Pleasingly they proved to be terrible and useless, which shows that a certain level of maturity and understanding has been gained on my part and, thus, the past few weeks of reading have not been wasted. Apparently I thought I was going to do focus groups and befriend practically everyone in Southern India in order to provide a thorough piece of research. I also seem to think that working with anyone else would be terrible, introducing a new' mechanism' into the research that may jeopardise the clean lines of success otherwise gained by dealing directly with local people myself. Obviously I would be fluent in the language and bedding down in a local hut with a local family. I also seemed to think that I was going to volunteer at a big organisation for long enough to become part of the furniture - so much so I was addressing ethics issues of what if they forget I am a researcher?! What sweet naivety. In contrast, it is now all I can do to get any information at all, in any method possible. I now face a second trip, the use of a Research Assistant, cannot and never will be able to speak the language fluently, will never not be 'other' enough to be forgotton about and will probably be using some kind of survey format to get the bulk of my info.

How things change!

So, having noticed a lot of this rubbish and pointless hoo-haa-ing I know now that I can come to this chapter with a lot of knowledge and grown-up thoughts about how to address and conclude this research. This is fantastic. But didn't take very long! I should start this process, but instead I am going to follow my heart and skive for the rest of the day knowing that I can come back to it on Sunday and start with some quite easy and satisfying editing.

Have good weekends all!

Till Sunday then,
x J