June 1

Now I am trying to really get going on crunching my data. I had some false starts in the past couple of weeks (more "try" than "do") but seeing a colleague defend his dissertation has helped me to get some "doing" done.

I have over 300 surveys completed, although I only needed 210. This is great for the data (and for the eventual publishability, according to one committee member), but means a cartload of work. Especially the qualitative analyses. That may be the point where I contact former students and ask if they want some research experience. I know there is one student who is interested in helping over the summer, but I don't know what to do with her help yet. Sometimes setting up things for someone else to help takes longer than doing it yourself.

As it turns out, I don't have the scoring sheet for one of my instruments after all, but for a shorter version of it. Therefore I have applied to the publisher to be allowed to order it. That was a week ago; don't know how long it might take. A colleague also has it and is willing to lend me his, but he has recently moved and still has to unpack all his stuff. I also need to figure out where on the publisher's site I need to apply to use the instrument for research. Nevertheless, I can still score the other segments of the survey (for now, that one is almost an aside, anyway.)

I spent a couple of days getting re-started, and figuring out how I want to do the scoring. I began scoring the survey instruments, at which I feel a bit rusty. I had some conflicting information regarding my main instrument. The researcher who developed this instrument sent me a version that has items that were removed (or not counted) in the article he published validating the instrument. Therefore I have determined to omit these items, as upon reviewing my proposal, I used the figures from that article. (Also I want valid, defendable data!)

I discovered that there may be some surveys that are missing parts--that is, the very first one I did was missing the section of the indices that addressed structural aspects of experience, though it did include the section that addressed voluntary aspects of experience. I hope there are not many like that. This is something that may make having all those "extra" surveys advantageous. I'll still use that person's data, as the other parts are still there. There will just be some missing data for that section. Also found one person who did the entire survey, but didn't sign the consent form. Can't use that one, obviously.

Anyway...off to install newer stats program and begin the spreadsheet.

Oh yeah--I noticed that while I do now have version 11.5 of the program (and felt happy to be updating from version 9!), a colleague who recently defended his diss was using version 13.0. I think that is another thing that definitely enhances publishability. However, I guess simply getting done is also an important goal here.