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.