Tuesday 29 May 2012

My thesis

Next year I should be doing my Psychology Honours thesis.  Yes I know - too old for all that stuff - I've already done an Honours and Masters degree, and yes here I am again - mad or what!  Partly I thought that Psychology would be a good career change for a single mother so here I am now childless and wondering if I want to continue with psychology ....anyway just pressing on for the moment. 
I've been trying to get myself organised and not leave my thesis topic to the last minute so I put quite a bit of work into trying to find an organisation who I could do something useful for.  I had some interest from a foster care organisation and as of yesterday was pretty sorted to do a qualitative study interviewing people who had undertaken foster care training and then decided not to go ahead with foster care.  The study would have looked at barriers and facilitators for people contemplating foster care.  It would have been a good study, but there are only a small number of supervisors at my Uni who do qualitative research and so far they have either said no or maybe to me - even though they think it's a great topic.  So with underwhelming enthusiasm and the knowledge that a qualitative study is going to be harder I have just decided so 'stuff it'.  I don't want to make my life harder than it already is, I don't want to be martyr to the cause - trying to do a study that will be useful while fighting an uphill battle. 
So I've just come up with an idea that would look at childless women.  I had originally planned on doing a study on childless women, but then went warm on the idea as I didn't want to have my whole life defined by being childless, I also didn't want to be telling people my thesis topic and outwardly be admitting this is a large part of my life.  So anyway I've kind of decided on a topic, back to square one with trying to find a supervisor - a job for later this week.  Alas I can't say what the topic is as I may be asking you to complete a survey and it's really ruins the study if participants know the hypothesis.  For now I'm just going to rest in my feeling of excitement which feels great after the flat feeling of 1 rejection and one non-commital today.  Also I'll only have one ethics committee to get through at the Uni if I don't work with the foster care agency.

2 comments:

  1. Fantastic! And I'd happily fill in a survey.

    I've actually been trawling through lots of the academic literature on childlessness... and am really fascinated with all of it. Most of what I read suggests it is an under-studied area, so I'm sure you could make a great contribution to the field.

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  2. Thanks for your enthusiasm, alas most Honours theses seem to end up pretty simple, so I'm not expecting to make any earth shattering findings. But will certainly be keen to have your input in the form of a survey completed.
    Thanks

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