It is time for confessions... I am the parent of two wonderful, special children, one of whom has been diagnosed with "special needs." Those of you who know me as a parent, may know this, and wonder why it is a big deal for me to build up to a big "confession," but anyone who knows me in a more professional setting may be more surprised by this piece of information, and even more so by my decision to write about it today. I think that there is a lot of pressure in western society to compartmentalize our lives, and, specifically, it is, in my humble opinion, an implicit imperative to keep our family lives "private" or "hidden" in our places of work, especially, if you want to be taken seriously in the "boys' club" of academic leadership.
That may sound dramatic, but I have had conversations with peers or supervisors about "other women" who have talked too much about their kids or needed too much time off for their families. I have seen the rolled eyes, and heard the dismissive comments. I am smart, I can take a hint... it's okay to talk about how cute your kids are occasionally, and even make a passing comment about how crazy your life is, but just don't go ON about it too much. I feel churlish writing that, since we have come a long way, and I am VERY fortunate to have flexible work hours and a very sympathetic boss who has kids and a wife who also has a career in academia. He is always understanding if I have to work from home because of a sick child, or leave early for a dentist appointment. I am also blessed with an office mate who probably knows way more about my family life than she would ever want to, and is always a sympathetic ear nonetheless. And last, but definitely not least, I have a loving husband who does his best to contribute and pull his parenting weight. But still I feel that I can't really talk about my family's struggles, especially when things are not going smoothly, if I want to be taken seriously at work. Maybe that is just my perception or problem, but that doesn't make it any less real for me.
And of course, children with special needs add a whole extra layer of taboo. Western society is implicitly elitist, with fairly narrow definitions of success and appropriate behavior, and as long as children fit within those narrow performance parameters, privacy is respected and maintained, if not actively enforced. But if your child is different in any way, especially if they can't be pigeonholed into a fairly limited list of labelled "types" or syndromes, then it is all too easy to start to feel inadequate as a parent, and that enforced privacy can make you feel very alone, or even ashamed. There is very little sense of community support for parenting "difficult" children, and although services are available, the onus is on parents to seek them out and advocate for their children. This can be very time-consuming, and is emotionally very draining. Couple that with the perceived imperative to leave your family problems out of the work place, and it is all too easy to end up feeling stressed and overwhelmed.
Both of our sons are academically very bright, so they are often rewarded for their apparent school success and achievement. But our younger son also has some fairly significant difficulties with integrating and making sense of the world. Amongst other things, he craves and needs almost constant sensory stimulation, especially in the form of movement and deep pressure and tactile input. It is very hard for him to sit still, or settle at bedtime, and his greatest relaxation comes from running, and crashing and moving, or, deep squeezing and hugging. We have been very fortunate to find great occupational and other therapists who have helped us and him to understand this better, and find ways for him to find the exercise and sensory input that he needs. Sports are a great outlet for him, and he spends every spare moment outside, weather permitting, practicing his favorite skills. After a long, and busy day, when most of us just want to collapse on the sofa, he will de-stress by going outside and pounding a lacrosse ball against his rebounder net, or shooting a soccer ball into the goal over and over again. He will never choose to relax or keep still, so he hates going to the movies and long trips where he can't move and run around. He has made incredible progress in being able to manage these needs so that he can attend school, pay attention and flourish in the classroom, although you will often see him crossing his arms across his chest and giving himself "squeezes" to self-regulate. But sometimes, and especially recently, he just sort of melts down when it all gets too much.
After what felt like a long winter, and a very rainy spring so far, his frustration level with not being able to go outside enough is at its zenith, and his tolerance for being thwarted in any way is at an all time high. Since he doesn't do anything by halves, when he loses control, he really lets loose on whoever is in his way. Fortunately, he understands when and where it is "safe" to do this on some level, so we have only had to deal with this behavior at home so far, but it can be pretty terrifying to behold, and recently it has happened a couple of times with our babysitter. To say that it has disrupted the dynamic of our family, is an understatement. So I find myself, after a few years of feeling like his needs were being managed appropriately and adequately, casting around again for support and interventions. This means asking for help, calling psychologists and counselors, filling out endless paperwork, explaining and justifying every little detail of our family life to relative strangers, and always, the endless scheduling and waiting for appointments. So when my PhD advisor expressed concern with my progress on my research proposal, I did what any reasonable, graduate student would do under the circumstances - I started to avoid her.
To paraphrase Talking Heads (yes, I know I am showing my age...!) "this is not my beautiful life," this is NOT how I planned things to be. One thing that I have learned is that avoidance is not a good tactic - it just causes more stress, and, ultimately it comes back to bite you. But that is what I have resorted to simply because I just don't know what else to do. I have been so socialized not to talk about my stress and worry, not to mention the time taken up by our little guy's problems, that I don't know how to talk to my advisor about my lack of progress. I just keep thinking that if I just have a few more weeks, I could pound something out that is really impressive and then I won't have to explain why I have done so little up until that point. But, as I am discovering, that is a really good recipe for writer's block - fatigue, stress, and unrealistically high expectations.
So when I came across a book yesterday, (when I was supposed to be working on the aforementioned proposal), called, "The Anti-Romantic Child" something deep inside me resonated with both the title and the description. Priscilla Gilman describes, in far more eloquent and beautiful terms than I can, the process, frustrations, delights and challenges, of finding out about her child's special needs, and how she learned to understand and love him, as well as advocate for him. It is a beautiful book, not least because it is interspersed with quotations from Wordsworth, the subject of the author's own PhD dissertation, and she makes a compelling case for Wordsworth's ability to illuminate the loss of childhood and innocence, and his advocacy for us to be able to welcome and accept the outcast and those who are in some way different in our lives. I sat there, in OSU's very imposing main campus library, and could not put it down. I felt as if someone was transcribing my heart onto the page, through the mirror image of her life and words, and that gave me a sense of community and insight.
I am usually too cynical to write fan letters, but I did post a brief, heartfelt message on the book's Facebook page last night. To my delight and surprise, Priscilla responded, kindly and generously. It is so good to reach out and find others struggling with the same or similar problems in the world, and to feel welcomed into a community of sorts. But what also inspires me about Priscilla's book and message, is how open she has been about her family's issues and struggles, as well as the difficult choices that she has made about her own life and career in response to them, and how that has brought her closer to peace and fulfillment. It gave me hope, and it made me brave enough to try, in my own small way, to talk about the personal story of my family in a more open way.
Now, I just have to get back to writing that research proposal again.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
I don't know how she does it*
*With apologies to Allison Pearson, but NOT the Hollywood version, which looks to be atrocious.
As a working mother, (doing a PhD on the side), I occasionally get that, "I don't know how you do it!" comment and I still haven't figured out how to handle it. I can't help feeling a little patronized, which puts me on guard, and I don't know what to say. Acknowledge that it's hard but that we get by somehow, and I sound arrogant, downplay it and I come off as insincere. I usually try some flip answer, like, "I don't know that I do most of the time!" which is also as close to the truth as I can articulate. The truth is, I just barely hold it all together in most instances, and then, every couple of months or so (and it is no coincidence that that timeline coincides with the academic quarter system mentioned last week), it all falls apart, and my life disintegrates spectacularly. Friday morning was such a morning.
It had already been a crazy week - finals, which included several late nights, on top of a regular workload for me, and my dear husband was busy with setting exams and grading for his classes, with lots of early meetings, and a day out of town. After all that, I was really stressed about Friday, since I was doing a presentation to our students, on behalf of our Associate Dean of Student Affairs, immediately followed by my first PhD committee meeting. The presentation was ready, but I was trying to fit about an hour's worth of information into 45 minutes, and I had to be in the auditorium at 8:30 am sharp. And that meant, to factor in rush-hour traffic, I had to leave as soon as the kids got on the school bus, or I would be late. Really, though, the real problem was that I was uptight about my committee meeting, unsure of what to expect, and anxious about what new curve balls would be thrown my way. So, of course, on some level, my poor kids picked up on my tension, and those are always the times that they start to act up the most.
To be fair, for the most part, my 11 year old has started to figure out that if Mum or Dad are stressed, and especially if we both are, then those are the times to hunker down and get things done as co-operatively as possible, although he had had an unexplained meltdown with the babysitter the previous day, which I had had to smooth over. Our 7 year old, though, seems to have a knack for picking up on the tension, and then escalating it. It's almost as if on some level he realizes that he is not the center of attention, and so feels the need to ratchet things up so that he is.
Yesterday, it all started with the weather, which was lovely and mild, and promising to improve into a nice, sunny, Spring day. So the 11 year old decided to wear shorts. So, of course, the 7 year old wanted to wear shorts. The problem being, that since the weather has been decidedly wintry until a few days ago, their idiot mother had not excavated the shorts from the depths of the closet recently. The older one figured it out, but the younger one could only find a pair of shorts that were his brother's cast-offs, and so were too big. His Dad suggested a belt, which was derided as an intolerable suggestion, so he was forced to wear a perfectly serviceable pair of jeans, which caused heartrending wails and gnashing of teeth. I started to do the math that the time it would likely take to placate him was considerably longer than we had until the bus arrived, which meant driving him to school, which would make me late. And that was one of those watershed moments when all the juggling balls of my life come crashing down, and I turned into evil bitch mother. Little one was rude to me, I yelled back, I tried to force socks onto his feet, he kicked me, and it all deteriorated from there.
Fortunately I am blessed to have a spouse who, while also extremely busy and also prone to stress-induced outbursts with the kids, seems to be able to tag-team with me, and just knows when I need him to step up the most. He sent the older one out to the bus stop, told me to leave, and promised he would deal with the little one and get him to school. So, of course, it all worked out. To an outside observer, it may even have appeared to be another day when the Allen family managed to pull it together and get done what needed to be done. And for that, I suppose, I am lucky to have such a wonderful partner. The truth is, though, I drove into work in mental and emotional turmoil, and survived my presentation, my meeting, and the rest of the day in a state of bewilderment and stress. By the time I got home, I was exhausted, and drank two glasses of wine faster than I should have. Yes, we pulled it together, but those are the days when I worry about what it is doing to the state of our mental health, and also about how little it would take for it all to fall apart. Little one had another two temper tantrums over the next 24 hours, which has left us all drained and sad. We don't have any family to fall back on, any help we have, we have to pay (and, sometimes, cajole and beg), and there are days when it is not so obvious whose deadline or meeting takes precedence, and my darling husband and I start to turn on each other.
After days like that, it seems that the question is not HOW I do it, but WHY? (The same question, incidentally, that Allison Pearson's protagonist ends up asking). Why do I put myself and my family through all of this, when, unlike many other dual income households, we are lucky enough to be able to afford to survive on my husband's income? Most, privileged, middle class mothers are delighted to be able to at stay home, and undoubtedly are much more available to their children, and so, are arguably better mothers. I worry that I am disadvantaging my kids, and creating stress and tension for my whole family. But I love my work. It provides me with a lot of personal fulfillment, and I believe that I am contributing to the world in a meaningful way. And isn't that a good model for my kids? I also doubt that many men ever stop and worry about whether their choice of careers are causing stress and tension in their households. I accept that those men are socialized to believe that this is because they need to be the primary breadwinner, but I believe that many of them would choose to work even if they didn't need to, or if their wives earned more than them. I say that not to imply that men should want to be stay-at-home parents more, but because I think it is more socially acceptable for them to actually enjoy their work, and define themselves by more than just their parental status.
Maybe that is why that opening comment makes me so uneasy, because I don't really believe that I am being complimented. At least some of the time, the comment is really a coded criticism for my choice to be a working mother, when we don't need me to work for financial reasons. Or, at least, I hear it that way. And, unfortunately, unlike Pearson's protagonist in her book, and despite wrestling with this, I still believe that I am entitled to forge my own career path, and I have not come to the conclusion that I should give it all up and become a housewife. I did, for a short time, quit my veterinary practice and stayed at home when our youngest had some health problems as a baby, and I am glad that I spent that time with him, and with our oldest for that year before he started school. But, as my husband would attest, I was a little insane that year, and missed working a great deal. I have great respect for stay-at-home mothers and the work that they do, but I am just not cut out for that lifestyle, and I don't want to model sacrificing who I am to my kids. Finally, though, I will admit to being a little resentful that I have to go through that whole justification process with myself every time we have a meltdown day. No one else is making me feel those feelings of guilt, or making me justify my decisions other than the voices in my head. Certainly not my husband, who is incredibly supportive and encouraging about my career and my studies. But society has indoctrinated me well, and I don't know how to make those voices stop - maybe drugs? Now there is a niche for the pharmaceutical industry...
As a working mother, (doing a PhD on the side), I occasionally get that, "I don't know how you do it!" comment and I still haven't figured out how to handle it. I can't help feeling a little patronized, which puts me on guard, and I don't know what to say. Acknowledge that it's hard but that we get by somehow, and I sound arrogant, downplay it and I come off as insincere. I usually try some flip answer, like, "I don't know that I do most of the time!" which is also as close to the truth as I can articulate. The truth is, I just barely hold it all together in most instances, and then, every couple of months or so (and it is no coincidence that that timeline coincides with the academic quarter system mentioned last week), it all falls apart, and my life disintegrates spectacularly. Friday morning was such a morning.
It had already been a crazy week - finals, which included several late nights, on top of a regular workload for me, and my dear husband was busy with setting exams and grading for his classes, with lots of early meetings, and a day out of town. After all that, I was really stressed about Friday, since I was doing a presentation to our students, on behalf of our Associate Dean of Student Affairs, immediately followed by my first PhD committee meeting. The presentation was ready, but I was trying to fit about an hour's worth of information into 45 minutes, and I had to be in the auditorium at 8:30 am sharp. And that meant, to factor in rush-hour traffic, I had to leave as soon as the kids got on the school bus, or I would be late. Really, though, the real problem was that I was uptight about my committee meeting, unsure of what to expect, and anxious about what new curve balls would be thrown my way. So, of course, on some level, my poor kids picked up on my tension, and those are always the times that they start to act up the most.
To be fair, for the most part, my 11 year old has started to figure out that if Mum or Dad are stressed, and especially if we both are, then those are the times to hunker down and get things done as co-operatively as possible, although he had had an unexplained meltdown with the babysitter the previous day, which I had had to smooth over. Our 7 year old, though, seems to have a knack for picking up on the tension, and then escalating it. It's almost as if on some level he realizes that he is not the center of attention, and so feels the need to ratchet things up so that he is.
Yesterday, it all started with the weather, which was lovely and mild, and promising to improve into a nice, sunny, Spring day. So the 11 year old decided to wear shorts. So, of course, the 7 year old wanted to wear shorts. The problem being, that since the weather has been decidedly wintry until a few days ago, their idiot mother had not excavated the shorts from the depths of the closet recently. The older one figured it out, but the younger one could only find a pair of shorts that were his brother's cast-offs, and so were too big. His Dad suggested a belt, which was derided as an intolerable suggestion, so he was forced to wear a perfectly serviceable pair of jeans, which caused heartrending wails and gnashing of teeth. I started to do the math that the time it would likely take to placate him was considerably longer than we had until the bus arrived, which meant driving him to school, which would make me late. And that was one of those watershed moments when all the juggling balls of my life come crashing down, and I turned into evil bitch mother. Little one was rude to me, I yelled back, I tried to force socks onto his feet, he kicked me, and it all deteriorated from there.
Fortunately I am blessed to have a spouse who, while also extremely busy and also prone to stress-induced outbursts with the kids, seems to be able to tag-team with me, and just knows when I need him to step up the most. He sent the older one out to the bus stop, told me to leave, and promised he would deal with the little one and get him to school. So, of course, it all worked out. To an outside observer, it may even have appeared to be another day when the Allen family managed to pull it together and get done what needed to be done. And for that, I suppose, I am lucky to have such a wonderful partner. The truth is, though, I drove into work in mental and emotional turmoil, and survived my presentation, my meeting, and the rest of the day in a state of bewilderment and stress. By the time I got home, I was exhausted, and drank two glasses of wine faster than I should have. Yes, we pulled it together, but those are the days when I worry about what it is doing to the state of our mental health, and also about how little it would take for it all to fall apart. Little one had another two temper tantrums over the next 24 hours, which has left us all drained and sad. We don't have any family to fall back on, any help we have, we have to pay (and, sometimes, cajole and beg), and there are days when it is not so obvious whose deadline or meeting takes precedence, and my darling husband and I start to turn on each other.
After days like that, it seems that the question is not HOW I do it, but WHY? (The same question, incidentally, that Allison Pearson's protagonist ends up asking). Why do I put myself and my family through all of this, when, unlike many other dual income households, we are lucky enough to be able to afford to survive on my husband's income? Most, privileged, middle class mothers are delighted to be able to at stay home, and undoubtedly are much more available to their children, and so, are arguably better mothers. I worry that I am disadvantaging my kids, and creating stress and tension for my whole family. But I love my work. It provides me with a lot of personal fulfillment, and I believe that I am contributing to the world in a meaningful way. And isn't that a good model for my kids? I also doubt that many men ever stop and worry about whether their choice of careers are causing stress and tension in their households. I accept that those men are socialized to believe that this is because they need to be the primary breadwinner, but I believe that many of them would choose to work even if they didn't need to, or if their wives earned more than them. I say that not to imply that men should want to be stay-at-home parents more, but because I think it is more socially acceptable for them to actually enjoy their work, and define themselves by more than just their parental status.
Maybe that is why that opening comment makes me so uneasy, because I don't really believe that I am being complimented. At least some of the time, the comment is really a coded criticism for my choice to be a working mother, when we don't need me to work for financial reasons. Or, at least, I hear it that way. And, unfortunately, unlike Pearson's protagonist in her book, and despite wrestling with this, I still believe that I am entitled to forge my own career path, and I have not come to the conclusion that I should give it all up and become a housewife. I did, for a short time, quit my veterinary practice and stayed at home when our youngest had some health problems as a baby, and I am glad that I spent that time with him, and with our oldest for that year before he started school. But, as my husband would attest, I was a little insane that year, and missed working a great deal. I have great respect for stay-at-home mothers and the work that they do, but I am just not cut out for that lifestyle, and I don't want to model sacrificing who I am to my kids. Finally, though, I will admit to being a little resentful that I have to go through that whole justification process with myself every time we have a meltdown day. No one else is making me feel those feelings of guilt, or making me justify my decisions other than the voices in my head. Certainly not my husband, who is incredibly supportive and encouraging about my career and my studies. But society has indoctrinated me well, and I don't know how to make those voices stop - maybe drugs? Now there is a niche for the pharmaceutical industry...
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Intellectual Sandbox
Amongst the various tasks that I need to get done to close out this academic quarter (what one friend refers to as her “freedom list”), I need to write an evaluation of the class I have been taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Research, Ed P&L 692. Fortunately, that is a relatively simple, and enjoyable task, largely because it was a really, fun, interesting class. In fact, this class was the closest I have come to “playing” since I started my doctoral program – which is high praise, indeed, from me. After all, I tell people that what I like most about working on my PhD is having the time, space, and permission to play in the intellectual sandbox of the social sciences. If that is the case, then this course gave me the bucket and spade, and some of those fun little sand molds for building sandcastles.
The course is also rare amongst graduate courses in that it really does do exactly what it sets out to do – that is, introduce you to the digital tools and software that you may need to conduct qualitative research, and provides an introduction to how to use them. We started off with the basics – blogs, wikis and citation management software, and moved on to audio and video editing and transcription software, through to the final session where we tried out some analysis software.
Although I thought that the first sessions might be a little tedious since I feel pretty familiar with those basic tools, I found new things to learn in terms of how they could be used, and the open-source software that is out there for managing them. For example, although I have been using Endnote for managing my references for a few years now, I had worried that maybe I was missing something by not using other software. This class gave me a chance to use some of those other systems, and discover that although there are always pros and cons, I am pretty content with my investment in Endnote. Similarly, I had known about Google reader, and how it could be used to provide a digest of all the blogs I follow, but, until this course, I had not got around to setting it up. I still want to figure out a better way to integrate notes, pdf’s of the references and their citations. The cute little elephant icon of Evernote is mocking me from my MacBook’s menu bar as I write this, but I have just not had the time to play with that enough to figure out how useful that will be. File that as still on my “to-do” list.
The real strength of this course, however, became apparent when we started recording, editing and transcribing audio and video, which are a critical component of most qualitative research. I have been fortunate to take this course in conjunction with EPL 966, the second course in our core Qualitative Inquiry sequence, in which we have been interviewing and transcribing interviews. So it was really great to have access to and tuition on these tools just in time to use them. I have used both TransanaExpress Scribe for transcribing, and plan to use HyperRESEARCH to play around with coding. I think that if I had been shown these tools separated from the need to use them for 966, I might not have appreciated their importance. Then, when I did need them for transcribing and coding, I would probably have forgotten a lot of the detail of how to use them. So, I think that I was lucky to have the opportunity to take both of these courses at the same time. and
In fact, I think that this course should really be the lab component of the main 966 methodology course. That would also justify expanding this course, 692, into a 2 credit component of 966, so that it could run as a weekly 2 hour lab throughout the quarter, rather than just for half the quarter for 1 credit. There is so much software out there to try, and it is only really in a lab session that you have the opportunity to try it all out. 966 would also provide the data that you need to test the software adequately. And having more time would also allow for a more in-depth discussion of the methodological implications of using digital tools in research.
Overall, though, probably most significant of all for me about this course, was being prompted to set up this very blog for myself. I have long been a rather compulsive follower of various blogs, and have always kept some kind of personal journal, so it is surprising, really, that I never got around to setting up my own blog. Part of that was due to lack of time and motivation to explore the software involved, but, probably more importantly, there was no real reason or excuse to feel like I could or should inflict my voice on the blogosphere. Now that I have done so, I find it surprisingly liberating. And my concern about whether anyone really wants to read it is, actually, irrelevant. Not that I don’t welcome readers, if you are out there, but that I am finding it interesting writing for my blog whether anyone is reading or not. In other words, in the blogosphere, even if no one sees the tree falling in the forest, it still matters, to me, at least. The question is, will I continue now that the course requirement to do so is over? It remains to be seen, but I think that I will be back. So watch this space.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
End of the quarter performance
Ohio State’s academic calendar is based on the quarter system, although, as those of us in curriculum development know only too well, that is about to change in the summer of 2012 when we will switch to semesters. This means that no sooner have you started a class, than you seem to be wrapping it all up and preparing for finals. This leaves me with the paradoxical feeling of being both exhausted from all the hurrying by the last third of the quarter, and also overwhelmed by how quickly things have progressed. For those of you who are runners, the quarter system is the equivalent of the 400m – short enough that you are supposed to sprint, but long enough that your legs and lungs feel as if they are going to explode by the time you get to the third turn. Just for reference, I used to run the 400m (and even held the dubious distinction of holding my school record for a few years), but not because I was a sprinter, but because I was a middle distance runner who was willing to push my speed a bit, and, frankly, because no one else wanted to run that distance.
This quarter, in particular, seems to have both flown by, and, dragged on. That means that I am not ready for the great academic version of “show and tell” that is otherwise known as finals. I mean, I guess I am “ready” in that I have learned everything that I need to have learned, and am ready to regurgitate it back onto the page to be judged by the esoteric standards of graduate school, but, in a more fundamental sense I am not ready to be done. I was going to say, “in an emotional sense,” but we had a big debate in my Qualitative Methodology class yesterday about whether “emotions” are just a social construction used to interpret our embodied performance in the world – I know, don’t even get me started on how pretentious and out of touch with the real world THAT all sounds.
I am rambling, and that, ironically, is kind of my point. I am in a meandering, introspective state of mind. Maybe, it has something to do with the fact that we have had three birthdays in our family this quarter – including the big 4-0 for me, and my oldest son’s 11th birthday today, which brings back memories of my own transition into motherhood. Or, maybe it is the wet and gloomy English weather that we are having in Central Ohio, or the smoky taste of the Russian Caravaner’s Tea that I have found at a great tea shop in Columbus, which reminds me of the tea I used to buy from a market stall in Cambridge as an undergraduate. I suspect, however, that while those may all be contributory conditions for this morbid introspection, they are not sufficient on their own. There is something else about my current limbic state that seems to be making me vague, and dreamy, and thoughtful. None of which is very conducive to frantic, academic performance, whilst juggling a curriculum conversion, a household which produces dirty clothes at a rate that threatens to take over our basement laundry at any moment, and organizing a pre-teen birthday sleepover.
Yet here I am, in graduate school, as a wife, mother and professional educator, trying to perform. This is where the real work of a doctoral program kicks in – can you still strap on the tap shoes and dance, when all around you is chaos and mayhem? I am increasingly convinced that if you do earn a degree at the end of all this, it is measure of survival more than brilliance. Cynical, moi?
Sunday, January 30, 2011
What the heck is CAQDAS? And why do I need to know about it?
For the uninitiated - okay, most of you sane people out there with a life - CAQDAS, as I discovered only recently, is an acronym for Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software. Since I aspire to be a qualitative researcher, and a bit of a (marginal) tech geek, then the prospect of computer software that can assist me in analyzing data is very appealing. So this is what this post is going to be about... fair warning to those of you (okay everyone apart from my course instructor) who is already dozing off.
Actually, just to backtrack a little, although I refer to myself as a qualitative researcher, to be honest, I am really a mixed methodologist, since my dissertation research and therefore my expertise will need to address both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Quantitative methods are more familiar to me with my biological sciences background, and, if I wanted an easier life, I should probably have stuck to quantitative methods for my doctoral research. But then, if I wanted an easier life, I probably wouldn't be attempting a PhD in the first place, and I find qualitative methods intuitively appealing. From a more scholarly perspective, I think that my research questions about the career choices of female veterinary students in the context of feminization of the profession, are best explored, at least initially, through open-ended interviews and discussion with a few students. Then I will develop the emerging themes into a more quantitative, national survey. Anyway, with that in mind, since quantitative methods rely pretty heavily on specialist softare packages such as SPSS these days, I figured that qualitative research should be able to do the same.
So, how does all my methodological angst relate to CAQDAS? Well, one of the points made in the article, by Koenig, that we read for class, was that since there are so many different versions of CAQDA software out there, it is important to match the right software to the methodological and theoretical approaches of your research. Although this is a very appealing sort of symmetry, if I may be cynical, I suspect that the reason there are so many options for software on the market is less to do with methodological diversity, and more to do with the fact that none of them are clearly superior to the others, with all the features that you need them to do. The other thing that rapidly becomes apparent in reading this article, is that mundane things such as the platforms supported by each software will limit selection significantly, especially if you are a Mac user - which I am. Of the long list of software reviewed by the article, only two can be used with Mac OS X - HyperRESEARCH and TAMS.
This surprised me, since it is increasingly rare to encounter Mac-Windows incompatibility with software these days, and this was another indication that the development of this kind of software is still in its infancy. It is my impression (not that I have much to back this up with) that more established types of software are pretty universally available on both platforms these days. Another indication that CAQDAS is still evolving pretty rapidly was that many of the features that were considered lacking in HyperRESEARCH by Koenig, have recently been addressed in a new upgrade, according to the Researchware website. Amongst these updates are the addition of hierarchical (rather than flat) coding capabilities; better linking to the same company's transcription software HyperTRANSCRIBE, to allow display and synchronization of transcriptions to the original audio or video media; and, support for Rich Text Format (rtf) files. These were all issues cited as being a problem for this software by Koenig, and so I am encouraged that they have been addressed. I am intrigued, also, by the fact that HyperRESEARCH has the ability to allow you to diagrammatically link different codes, in a relatively straightforward manner. I am a big fan of concept mapping, and use IHMC Cmap tools software quite a lot to map out my research, so I am curious to see how this works.
I think that one of the main problems in distinguishing between all the options for CAQDA software, and for fully understanding Koenig's article, is that I don't fully understand the process of coding and analyzing qualitiative research data yet. All of the other software that we have surveyed in this class has been designed to perform a function that I have tried to do in other ways - organize and cite references, organize notes, and so on. But the whole concept of coding is still pretty fuzzy to me, so it is really hard for me to distinguish the pros and cons of different features of these kinds of software. In this arena I am still stuck in the dualistic cognitive learning phase where I just want someone to tell me what to think.
HyperRESEARCH is relatively expensive, at least for a poor student ($199 without the transcription software), but they do have a free trial version. Coincidentally, when I did a search through my university's Office of Information Technology, to see if HyperRESEARCH is available under an institutional license (which it is not), I came across an article written by my PhD advisor, which used HyperRESEARCH for the data analysis. It looks as if that was an older version, but I will be interested hear what she thought of it. It is not encouraging that she was asking ME about CAQDAS the other day, knowing that I was taking this class, and because she had just invested in a copy of NVivo, a rival system.
In the meantime, I have downloaded the trial copy, and I will give it a try, especially after we have gone over some basic techniques for using analysis software in class on Tuesday. I may report back. On the other hand, if it crashes my computer and destroys all my data, I may be gone for some time.
Actually, just to backtrack a little, although I refer to myself as a qualitative researcher, to be honest, I am really a mixed methodologist, since my dissertation research and therefore my expertise will need to address both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Quantitative methods are more familiar to me with my biological sciences background, and, if I wanted an easier life, I should probably have stuck to quantitative methods for my doctoral research. But then, if I wanted an easier life, I probably wouldn't be attempting a PhD in the first place, and I find qualitative methods intuitively appealing. From a more scholarly perspective, I think that my research questions about the career choices of female veterinary students in the context of feminization of the profession, are best explored, at least initially, through open-ended interviews and discussion with a few students. Then I will develop the emerging themes into a more quantitative, national survey. Anyway, with that in mind, since quantitative methods rely pretty heavily on specialist softare packages such as SPSS these days, I figured that qualitative research should be able to do the same.
So, how does all my methodological angst relate to CAQDAS? Well, one of the points made in the article, by Koenig, that we read for class, was that since there are so many different versions of CAQDA software out there, it is important to match the right software to the methodological and theoretical approaches of your research. Although this is a very appealing sort of symmetry, if I may be cynical, I suspect that the reason there are so many options for software on the market is less to do with methodological diversity, and more to do with the fact that none of them are clearly superior to the others, with all the features that you need them to do. The other thing that rapidly becomes apparent in reading this article, is that mundane things such as the platforms supported by each software will limit selection significantly, especially if you are a Mac user - which I am. Of the long list of software reviewed by the article, only two can be used with Mac OS X - HyperRESEARCH and TAMS.
This surprised me, since it is increasingly rare to encounter Mac-Windows incompatibility with software these days, and this was another indication that the development of this kind of software is still in its infancy. It is my impression (not that I have much to back this up with) that more established types of software are pretty universally available on both platforms these days. Another indication that CAQDAS is still evolving pretty rapidly was that many of the features that were considered lacking in HyperRESEARCH by Koenig, have recently been addressed in a new upgrade, according to the Researchware website. Amongst these updates are the addition of hierarchical (rather than flat) coding capabilities; better linking to the same company's transcription software HyperTRANSCRIBE, to allow display and synchronization of transcriptions to the original audio or video media; and, support for Rich Text Format (rtf) files. These were all issues cited as being a problem for this software by Koenig, and so I am encouraged that they have been addressed. I am intrigued, also, by the fact that HyperRESEARCH has the ability to allow you to diagrammatically link different codes, in a relatively straightforward manner. I am a big fan of concept mapping, and use IHMC Cmap tools software quite a lot to map out my research, so I am curious to see how this works.
I think that one of the main problems in distinguishing between all the options for CAQDA software, and for fully understanding Koenig's article, is that I don't fully understand the process of coding and analyzing qualitiative research data yet. All of the other software that we have surveyed in this class has been designed to perform a function that I have tried to do in other ways - organize and cite references, organize notes, and so on. But the whole concept of coding is still pretty fuzzy to me, so it is really hard for me to distinguish the pros and cons of different features of these kinds of software. In this arena I am still stuck in the dualistic cognitive learning phase where I just want someone to tell me what to think.
HyperRESEARCH is relatively expensive, at least for a poor student ($199 without the transcription software), but they do have a free trial version. Coincidentally, when I did a search through my university's Office of Information Technology, to see if HyperRESEARCH is available under an institutional license (which it is not), I came across an article written by my PhD advisor, which used HyperRESEARCH for the data analysis. It looks as if that was an older version, but I will be interested hear what she thought of it. It is not encouraging that she was asking ME about CAQDAS the other day, knowing that I was taking this class, and because she had just invested in a copy of NVivo, a rival system.
In the meantime, I have downloaded the trial copy, and I will give it a try, especially after we have gone over some basic techniques for using analysis software in class on Tuesday. I may report back. On the other hand, if it crashes my computer and destroys all my data, I may be gone for some time.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Running, Freedom and Power
I was at about mile 2 of my run on a bitterly cold Saturday, and quite enjoying myself, when I turned the corner of my 5 mile loop and came face to face with the wind. A bitter, biting, breathtaking wind. And I thought, 'Whoa! Not so much fun, now, is it, Clare?!' And then I remembered Michael Kimmel's article "With the Wind at my Back," an article that finally helped this middle class, white English girl, start to understand race and privilege in America. Kimmel's analogy of privilege being like a wind behind your back, that you don't really notice, unless you are one of those having to work against it, really hit home with me because I am a runner.
I am a runner not so much in the sense that I get out there regularly, although I try to. More importantly, I consider myself a runner because I like running, and it makes me feel good, both mentally and physically. Even on the days, which are many, when going out for a run is the last thing I feel like doing, if I make the effort to get those running shoes laced up, and get myself out of the door, I am always glad that I did.
Saturday was a classic example. It was pretty cold here, with a fresh coat of snow only partially plowed off the roads - both good excuses for staying in by the fire. Not only that, but after a busy week, I had, metaphorically, run out of steam, and so even though I was up pretty early, I spent most of the morning mooching around in pajamas, getting some class-related reading done here and there, taking care of the boys, and circling back to bed every now and then. So when my dear husband got the little ones out of the house for a shopping expedition, it would have been all too easy to just hunker down in peace. But instead, I bundled up, set my iPhone to my favorite playlist, strapped on my Garmin Forerunner, and headed out into the tundra. And there it was... just half a mile down the road, I started to feel the bounce in my step and that feeling that it was good to be alive again.
I know this all sounds pretty alien to a lot of non-runners out there. I have had that conversation with my husband many times. He treadmill runs for fitness, and does not enjoy it at all, although he admits to feeling better afterwards. So he totally doesn't get how I can be such a freak about running, or why I would ever want to run, you know... just for fun. I am actually impressed with his dedication that he runs at all when it is as miserable as he describes it. It is much easier for me to be motivated, when I know that I will actually enjoy the experience. What he does takes much more effort.
So I was thinking about all of this as I headed down the road on Saturday. (Did I mention that I do my best thinking when I am out running as well?) I feel this incredible sense of freedom and power when my legs hit their groove, and I feel as if I can do anything, as if anything is possible. It is a pretty giddy feeling... or maybe it's just the endorphins kicking in. So that is when the wind sliced into the bare flesh on my face, and I thought of Kimmel's analogy. And I dug in, adjusted my stride and the angle of my body, and appreciated the fact that I could choose to run into the wind.
I am a runner not so much in the sense that I get out there regularly, although I try to. More importantly, I consider myself a runner because I like running, and it makes me feel good, both mentally and physically. Even on the days, which are many, when going out for a run is the last thing I feel like doing, if I make the effort to get those running shoes laced up, and get myself out of the door, I am always glad that I did.
Saturday was a classic example. It was pretty cold here, with a fresh coat of snow only partially plowed off the roads - both good excuses for staying in by the fire. Not only that, but after a busy week, I had, metaphorically, run out of steam, and so even though I was up pretty early, I spent most of the morning mooching around in pajamas, getting some class-related reading done here and there, taking care of the boys, and circling back to bed every now and then. So when my dear husband got the little ones out of the house for a shopping expedition, it would have been all too easy to just hunker down in peace. But instead, I bundled up, set my iPhone to my favorite playlist, strapped on my Garmin Forerunner, and headed out into the tundra. And there it was... just half a mile down the road, I started to feel the bounce in my step and that feeling that it was good to be alive again.
I know this all sounds pretty alien to a lot of non-runners out there. I have had that conversation with my husband many times. He treadmill runs for fitness, and does not enjoy it at all, although he admits to feeling better afterwards. So he totally doesn't get how I can be such a freak about running, or why I would ever want to run, you know... just for fun. I am actually impressed with his dedication that he runs at all when it is as miserable as he describes it. It is much easier for me to be motivated, when I know that I will actually enjoy the experience. What he does takes much more effort.
So I was thinking about all of this as I headed down the road on Saturday. (Did I mention that I do my best thinking when I am out running as well?) I feel this incredible sense of freedom and power when my legs hit their groove, and I feel as if I can do anything, as if anything is possible. It is a pretty giddy feeling... or maybe it's just the endorphins kicking in. So that is when the wind sliced into the bare flesh on my face, and I thought of Kimmel's analogy. And I dug in, adjusted my stride and the angle of my body, and appreciated the fact that I could choose to run into the wind.
Monday, January 17, 2011
My first blog - trying to get organized
So here it is - my first blog entry! It's strange, after years of writing for myself, and a small addiction to reading OTHER people's blogs, you'd have thought that I would have started my own blog a long time ago. But, it turns out, I am actually quite shy about sharing my thoughts about the world in a public forum, unless, of course, it is a status update on Facebook for select friends only. Even then, I am aware of editing myself quite a bit.
So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.
The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.
Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.
But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)
These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.
Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.
I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!
Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.
Bye for now!
So, I guess I may never have got around to setting up a blog if it wasn't a class requirement for a course I am taking on Digital Tools for Qualitative Researchers. Yikes! Not only do I have to publish my writing to the great, wide world of the internet, but I am supposed to sound somewhat scholarly and thoughtful as well. Scary stuff indeed. I have still not decided if I will really release this publicly (no doubt to be crushingly ignored by the world), or just submit it for the class and keep it private. Maybe I will compromise and only share it with select (and, hopefully indulgent) family and friends.
The good news is that actually setting up the blog was definitely the easy part. The toughest decision was which design template to pick, and it's not as if that is an irreversible decision. The next problem was what to call my blog. I can't claim to have put too much thought into that - "The Vetty Thesp" came back to me as I tried to come up with a quick and dirty description of who I am. At Cambridge, I was a vet student, who did a lot of acting, which was an unusual combination, hence the nickname. Most vets did sports, or outdoorsy, hearty activities, or, if they were smart (like my dear husband), they didn't do much extracurricular stuff at all since the vet course took up a lot of time and required more than your average amount of work. But I hung out with students in the humanities and social sciences, rehearsing, learning lines, and generally being slightly pretentious. I wasn't particularly talented, but had a wonderful time basking in the glow of people who were - including, just to name drop a bit, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Rachel Weisz, not that either one of them would remember me.
Anyway, these days I don't act, and I am not really a clinical vet either, but I do still seem to have (and enjoy) an interdisciplinary approach to life and work. I work in veterinary education - trying to design curricula for professional veterinary students, while working on my own PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership. As such, I feel like I am a bit of a translator, moving between the biological science paradigms and professional world of veterinary medicine, and the more postmodern, qualitative, social science world of higher education. So I stuck with the nickname for my blog, at least until I can come up with a better one.
But, enough rambling on about me. The other part of the class assignment was to review a piece of software that had been introduced in the course. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been trying to get organized, and so, it made sense to me to explore some of the software we had been talking about that is designed to help organize and keep track of scholarly references and notes. I have been using Endnote for a few years, thanks to my brilliant husband, who introduced me to it not long after I started my graduate program. It is pretty brilliant for organizing and keeping track of references, as long as you are disciplined at entering the relevant information as you come across it. The pay off comes when you are writing a paper, and you can use the "cite while you write" feature, so that you can add the citations directly from Endnote into Word. The software formats the citations according to whatever style manual you set it to (APA Style - 6th edition for most of my courses), AND creates the appropriate bibliography at the end of the document as well. For anyone that has ever done this manually, you will appreciate how awesome that is. (I know, I need to get out more...!)
These days, you can also link each reference in Endnote to a pdf of the article, as long the file is saved somewhere on your computer. The problem with that, is that I have not found a good way to organize and keep track of all the pdf's I have stored all over my hard drive. I have started to save them all into one folder for all my Endnote references, but, I have not been good about labeling them or sorting them by any other meaningful system. And so, it was with interest, that I learnt about Mendeley, a free software system that is designed to organize your academic reference pdf files.
Mendeley has some pretty cool features. I downloaded it onto the hard drive of my MacBook, and imported all the pdf files that I had in my Endnote folder - it extracted all the bibliographic information from the pdf's of all the journal articles, and so, effectively, created another bibliographic library. Since it is web-based, this means that I can access my library from any computer, including an iPhone and iPad app, which I have yet to try, but I am excited about. Finally, it allows you to mark up pdf's with highlighting and notes, similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that it is right there, linked to the bibliographic information.
I must admit that I am just beginning to explore all the features of Mendeley (this class assignment was due before I had time to play more). So I have not yet figured out how best to use it for my needs. I am particularly intrigued by the feature that allows you to set up an automatic sync with any folder on your hard drive, which would mean that anytime I add a file to my Endnote folder, it will update my Mendeley library as well. But I have found one big limitation, that makes me inclined to think that I am not letting go of my dear, comfort-blankie that is Endnote, and that is that Mendeley does not seem to cope well with pdf files of book chapters or other sources that are not journal articles. I don't think I realized how many of my references are non-journal articles, until I realized that I couldn't find them in Mendeley. I am sure that it is possible to manually enter that information, but I am loathe to go through that process when it is all right there in Endnote anyway - I just don't have the time to do that all over again. Maybe there is a way to download all that information from Endnote directly into Mendeley, but I haven't found it yet. Finally, it may be possible to "cite-while-you-write" from Mendeley, but again, I am not that far up the learning curve. Having said that, I am having problems, right now, with getting that feature to work with Endnote in my new MS Office for Mac 2011as well. For a technophobe like me, all these updates and additions sometimes end up being more exhausting than helpful. Sigh!
Finally, on a quick, fun note... this course on digital tools has also introduced me to Wordle. You can upload any word document or enter a website, and it will create an unlimited (?) number of really pretty word clouds based on the frequency of words in the text. I definitely haven't figured how I could use this for scholarly reasons, but it sure is fun to play with. Just for fun, I am attaching a word cloud of this blog post, as my first, official "Word Art:" My First Blog.
Bye for now!
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