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 :)
