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)