Happy Bec is happy!!

As the title suggests, things are progressing in a truly lovely manner at the moment.
I got ethics in the afternoon after I wrote the blog post - a full two months ahead of my planned submission time. It was great to get that done, and made for a relaxed few days once it was done.
I heard back from the comittee last week - with their only request being that I make a debriefing sheet (which will be presented as the final page of my survey). I spent Friday writing that, sending it off to Rod and then (after his approval) sending it to them. Its Monday morning as I write, so I haven't heard back from them yet, but am hoping to soon.
Once that's back and I get 'unconditional approval' (I'm truly relishing that moment) I have to run the final version of the survey past Rod, and then get it all up on survye monkey. I've had to make a few changes to the survey (I'm using a different stigma scale than I had originally planned), but after deliberating about that over the weekend I'm very pleased I have changed it. The revised version will be more empirically supported and flow a lot better - both of which are important for the final product. I did spend Thursday afternoon feeling completely overwhelmed when I changed the stigma measure over, but it made me really question what I'm trying to achieve with the result (I believe) being that my survey better reflects what I'm trying to find out.

While I was waiting for the ethics committee to get back to me last week, I procrastinated a little and submitted the paper I wrote for my research subject last year for publication. I spent most of a morning doing final edits and then sent it of to the Journal of Science Communication, which had been recommended by one of the markers of the paper.
As of yet I've only heard back from them to confirm they've got it (this is pretty normal though, I think). I have no idea how long I'll have to wait to find out if they've accepted or rejected it - I'm led to believe it could be a while. Still, its done! Regardless of the outcome, I'm pretty proud of myself to have at least got this far.

Back to the grindstone methinks - though I'm really not sure what that should be... Still, I'll figure it out :)

In the past week I've had a lovely reminder of what 'life' is. The ANU had its annual 'o-week' last week, and I took most of the week off to enjoy myself and catch up with friends who had just returned to the ANU from summer holidays.
During o-week I also became involved in the ANU Disabilities Collective. Headed up by a friend of mine, the collective is aiming to increase the profile of those students with disabilities at the ANU and possibly increase the funding that goes toward them. We also want to have a nice social atmosphere so those with disabilities can feel more included in the life of the ANU.
While this doesn't compeltely relate to my honours project, I feel that it will be addition to my life this year. I'm really passionate about all the issues the collective wants to raise and it will be nice to do something hands on occasionally (as opposed to spending the whole year behind a computer screen).

Back on the subject of honours though - despite the break, I'm still making progress (yay!).
Yesterday saw me finishing off the first draft of my ethics proposal - which was a great relief. I'll be reviewing it today and meeting with Rod tommorrow to look over it. If all goes well and I'm happy with it I'll send it to the ethics comittee on Friday. Ideally, this means I may have ethics approval in just over a week (depending on the revisions they want me to make).

In anticipation of that (and because spending all day writing an ethics proposal made me both tired and sick of honours) I've started putting my survey into survey monkey - the online tool through which I'll disseminate my survey. Survey monkey is proving to be a great tool - though it has made me very aware of how complex my survey is. There's a lot of work behind getting a survey to look the way I want it to - particularly given that, depending on a participants' responses, I'll be getting them to take different 'paths' in the survey. This has meant a lot of fiddling with the 'logic' options in survey monkey - something which will take quite a while to perfect. All in all, I'm realising that survey design involves a lot more than just coming up with questions!

I'm also trying to make sure I keep thinking abou my literature review/writing the thing up. While I'm sure its to an extent inevitable, I don't relish the thought of spending the last couple of months of honours simply writing up the 20 000 word thesis. In order to combat this I'm trying to make myself write/brainstorm a little each day. I've had mixed success with this thusfar - I can't help but feel that I have other priorities (such as makign the survey work) now.

On that note, priorities have to be one of the most interesting psychological aspects of this project. While I'm getting guidance from Rod, I'm largely left on my own to decide how my days/weeks are spent. I've (thankfully) fallen into the habit of coming into CPAS to do work - which has meant that once I achieve my goals for the day I can go home and forget about being an honours student. However, my inherent perfectionism has already made this a bit hard. I'm basically trying to work until I can't stand being here (or I've grossly overachieved on my targets) and then going home and refreshing myself for the next day. This capacity will vary throughout the year - but I'm hoping it works as a strategy.

Overall - life continues to be rather wonderful. While the target of 20 000 words and a first class still seems a world away - I'm taking, and achieving solidly, nice lovely baby steps and with any luck I'll continue that way.

Next time you hear from me I'll (hopefully) have submitted ethics and have more of a survey to chat to you about.

Progress to date

The academic year (which officially started on Jan 30th) started off with a whirlwind of activity.
Having been pretty certain on my topic for some time, I was lucky enough to have already done a fair amount of research on my topic. This has meant that I can jump straight into formulating a question and then a study.

I've just sent a bunch of work off to my supervisor for review - which he'll hopefully like, and I'll be able to go forward.

So far I have a question - which is

                How do young people talk about, and react to others talking about, suicide on facebook and are these factors in any way related to their levels of suicide stigma and literacy?

Which I'll then unpack into the following questions:

                How often do young people post about suicide on facebook?

    When young people post about suicide on facebook, what does it look like?

                How do young people react to posts by others about suicide?

                What levels of suicide stigma and literacy do young people have?

 I then have a four page survey (which will be administered online) which looks at answering the above questions.

My supervisor needs to approve the above (and a few other details), and while he's doing that I've started work on my ethics application. Ethics can make or break (to an extent at least) any honours project - and the fact that I'm asking people about behaviours related to suicide make it particularly crucial for what I'm doing. Doing the ethics application will involve a lot of explaining exactly what I'm doing and why. It also involves justifying all my statistical methods (which relate to why I'm designing my survey in the way that I am) - something I'm not looking forward to.

However - the upside is that I'm powering along, and am well ahead of the overall schedule that we're working to. This is good because it means if things go wrong later on (such as me having no grasp on statistical analysis) I'll have more time to panic/work on those.

 Will update here again when I've heard back from Rod and/or I get really frustrated with my ethics application (expect some whingeing in this stage of the project)

The project! (What is it?)

I'm using this blog to communicate as much as I can about my project. I talk about it a lot, but I'm not always great at getting exactly what I'm up to or the details of the project across.

While my topic will continue changing for a while yet, I'm three weeks into honours so I thought starting here would be a good start.

I'm looking at how young people (Australians specifically) use facebook to communicate about suicide.
Its fairly well understood that young people use social networking services (facebook in particular), but not a lot is understood about how people use it in times of crisis. If someone feels suicidial, what does their status update look like? (If they post one). And when someone sees a status that confers some sort of very negative emotion or suicidal intent - how do they react to it?

I believe that online communities can be really powerful, and how young people interact online can have significant effects on their mental health.

This project focuses on suicide for a number of reasons, one of which is because its more containable than 'mental health'. As such, there will be limitations, and some which I'm not entirely happy about. However, part of the challenge of an honours year is that you only get 10 months tobtu  come up with, design, run, analyse, and write up a study. In my case, that's having a 20 000 word thesis of original research produced by October 25th.

As the title of my blog says - this year is about me dreaming audaciously of success. I've never done anything like this before - but I'm lucky enough to have an amazing supervisor and truly awesome family and friends around me.

The dreamer (A bio)

So - here we are. The beggining of my honours year.

My name is Becca, I'm 22 years old and I'm spending 2012 writing an honours thesis. I'm doing honours as a student at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness (CPAS), which is part of the Australian National University (ANU).


As you'll see from this blog, I'm a bit obsessed with my project. But when I'm not, I can be found with friends, chilling out and laughing as much as possible.

I hope you enjoy whatever you read of the blog - I'd love feedback if you have any.

Here I go, dreaming audaciously of success...