Saying Something

Over the weekend I condensed my prospectus into an AERA application, one for which I had to make up my results. That was an exercise. But as I wrote, I realized the potential that the institutionalized children might share resilience in the form that "both worlds" might express it. Because they have lived on the streets, they are full aware of the challenges and struggles they have had to encounter and thus are perhaps more motivated to live an existance free of such struggle. At the same time, their life of formal education and shelter now would be added motivation to continue this life, particularly with the belief that, "I have come this far; why stop now?" I am perhaps being idealistic in this report, but I have faith that those kids are perhaps the most highly developed of them all.

I also want to clarify that the use of feminist psychologies and theories need not be attributed and associated only with female populations. The ideas of being relational, having a voice of reason that stems from other sources apart from universal rights and freedoms I think are largely universal. We may exhibit masculine and/or feminine energies and this occurs regardless of our physical gender.

I made my timeline for data collection. It looks like I'll be spending at least two weeks intensively with each group. I've divided each group into 11 subgroups, such that five TATs and five surveys and sentence completion tasks can be done each day. This would amount to about four hours per day. The end of the day would involve writing up the notes and perhaps some preliminary transcription. My research assistant is going to be doing a heck of a lot of work!

And that's what makes me nervous. I need the help, and I am worried that it might not be as perfect as I need or hope for it to be. I can't know these things until I get there. But when it comes to my work, I like to plan well in advance, have my cards in order, and really know what I am in for. In this case, a lot of what I'm about to do seems left to chance. I am trying every day to convince myself that this is good; this is practice for real research, then I stop myself and remember that what I am doing is real research. This is the real deal. And I can potentially really say something about these kids. That is simultaneously scary and exciting.

Busy

The last two weeks have felt a little out of my control, and I know the week after next will be the same. I am used to being independent and calling the shots in my life, but there have been so many pressures that I have needed to attend to, and they have prevented me from thinking about my work. All I know is the AERA and SRCD applications are due next week. I don't want to put too much pressure on myself to finish them, but it sure would be nice if I could present. So, I'm going to make that a priority on top of finishing packing my room, selling my furniture, finding a new place to live and/or putting my stuff in storage in the next 5 days. I can do this.

Things to look forward to?

Study group last week was great; I love my group members - the way they think about their questions, the different holes, ideas, and questions that emerge when they read a manuscript. We suggested that Carolyn practice her interview protocols before she started her data collection, and this got me thinking. I started envisioning myself at the children's centre, sitting with the moderator and interviewing the children. I'm not someone who gets scared about the future, but I am a little scared about this. I suppose my biggest fear is getting it all together. I need to rely very much on a research assistant to help me with the transcription and translation. That is the trickiest part. I have no doubt that I can do all the interviews with the institutionalized children and the street children, since KM is invested and has bought in. But the school children I am slightly worried about; I don't have a real plan in place, but right now it wouldn't make sense to really make a plan. Things always change when you're in the field. And that seems to be the most nerve wracking point right now. Technical difficulties will be a frustration, I'm sure. Without DSL and 24 hour access to internet, I fear being cut off from my world here at Harvard, not being able to access needed resources, and just generally not being able to feel like part of my world when I am out in the field. I want to practice my protocols but I also know that these things change very much in the field. Be flexible. Relax. This will all get done.
At the same time, I have many things to look forward to. Stories! I simply cannot wait to hear their stories. I know they have some; I just hope they tell them as candidly as possible in that situation. And the inspiration; I am very much looking forward to the fresh inspiration that always comes with this process.
This is a process of inspiration, motivation, frustration, anxiety.
Yet, I am looking forward to it. It still sort of seems like a dream. Until I have my visa and my ticket, I think it will feel very far away. Even though I am preparing myself, I still have so much to do in Cambridge before I go. Once I go, zap, zap, zap, as Dad would say. Three down in three months, I hope. And then, let the analyses begin. Sigh. All these phases are so different yet so exciting: data collection, data analyses, data write-up. I'm so excited.

Images

The TAT images (so far)

It's great that I was able to get my hands on these. Unfortunately, they are about 30 years old and digitized versions of these do not exist, except in scanned form. So, either I have to call that dude and find out how he had them adapted to the Kenyan context (which would require that I shell out even more money to get those translations done), or beg to use the originals.

I still find these somewhat creepy. I am not sure how children approach them so I am really interested in my pilot test. But I suppose they're not creepy individually, and I am not showing them the really frightening ones, the pictures where it is hard to tell if the figures are men, women, children, or ghosts. I don't know exactly how to standardize, especially since now I have found the TAAT version which has been created specifically for African populations. But even that...something seems rather sketchy about them too.

Why Tanzania?

This dissertation is the most exciting phase of my doctoral student career, and perhaps for that reason, I am really nervous about it. There's a lot at stake in this study - up and leaving for Tanzania for a few months, leaving my life in Cambridge behind for a life among homeless and orphaned children with whom I have little in common. Yes I have friends in Tanzania, but it is nothing like my life here where I am comfortable, independent, secure, and more or less worry-free. While I worry about how smoothly my data collection will go, my biggest fear that follows me to Tanzania is that of being lonely. Field work is simultaneously exciting and lonesome. Without my typical commodoties in Tanzania, I am never quite sure what to do with myself in the evenings. And by that I mean my friends.

I love the children with whom I get to hang to collect my data. But I always miss my friends so much. It's not so much that I miss the presence of my friends; right now, my three or four favorite people to "be" with don't even live in Cambridge. I suspect it is more about availability, accessibility. It is more that "this world" works on a very different schedule than "that world." And as one world moves on, so does the other. It is different to say you are moving to DC to collect data for 4 months than to say you are moving to Africa to collect data for 4 months. With DC there's a possibility of a phonecall, a quick visit, a fleeting image of what life is like. But with Tanzania, though I am loath to magnify its foreigness, many of my friends cannot even picture where, what, how, and with whom I'm doing anything; images and visions are so fantastical they are almost unreal, unaccessible. That physical distance scares people, leaves us worlds apart, if only temporarily.

And because these worlds are so far apart, I wonder too how I will position myself as I collect my data. Will I watch attentively, be a part of the daily process, conduct, lead, participate, passively accept? Naturally, social norms will dictate much of this process, but I need to maintain a stance that allows me to collect "clean" data, see and learn new things, and maybe even contribute in ways I don't expect to right now.

As for the friends' accessibility issue, I want to scream out to just one or two people that I love them and need them to the point that I would bring them over there to see what I am doing, visit Meru and Zanzibar, and meet the children, all with my own money. But then even that seems somewhat intrusive to the whole adventure. I want to immerse myself, but I also want to maintain myself. This complication I'm sure is one we deal with frequently in cross-cultural studies. It is interesting, fresh, and new, but also scary, difficult, and real.

I suspect though that in truth, these worlds are less different and unique than I might think they are right now. There isn't a completely foreign quality to human nature that requires me to travel to Tanzania to discover. There is personal, intuitive, and deeply intrinsic knowledge to be gained though. And so Tanzania, India, Cambridge, or Ottawa, this study could have very well been done anywhere there are kids who are resilient and simultaneously "vulnerable." And this thought keeps me sane as long as I hope to pursue this line of inquiry.

What's Good For Us

Of all the things that routinely attack my brain, one of the most frequent questions I ask is, "How do people know what is good for them?" and following that, "If they know what's good for them, why don't they go for it?" I'm wondering specifically about efficacy. So for example, I know that working out at the gym is good for me. But sometimes I don't do it. Why not? The first answer that comes to mind is lack of motivation. But I know it is good for me; why isn't that motivation enough? Shouldn't I want to do things that are good for me? Then I started thinking that maybe the reason we don't do things that we know are good for us is because we don't know if we will succeed or be good at it. And when we are not good at something, it can be frustrating. Though we are adults, we are still tempted by instant gratification and we want things to come to us more or less automatically. We don't want things to be hard.

But, the interesting thing is that many people believe they can do things, even if they have never tried it before. This belief comes from a lifetime's worth of baggage of trial and error - knowing that they've tried maybe similar things before and have succeeded, or have failed. And in the cases where they failed, they persisted, believed that eventually they could do it, and ultimately succeeded. So when people have that belief in themselves that they can succeed, they are often more resilient, more willing to take (healthy) risks, more willing to make decisions. I suspect they are resilient because failure does not affect them as much; they have learned to survive and thrive by being persistent and maintaining the belief that, no matter what difficulty presents itself, they can succeed. The belief that we can accomplish a specific task before we try to accomplish that task is called self-efficacy.

And this idea of self-efficacy is extremely pervasive and powerful when it comes to living life at a certain standard. I would guess that low self-efficacy throws us into a flaccid inertia where our belief that we can't perform certain tasks successfully keeps us from doing the things that are perhaps good for us. But those who have a strong belief in their ability to succeed - no matter the task - tend to be the active kind who are doing the things that are good for them.

A slight complication arises when we try to think about what is good for us. This is obviously relative, but there are clearly some universals. Eating good, nutritious food is good for us. Some would say getting an education is good for us. Being healthy is good for us. Having friends and some kind of social support is good for us. But what if, just for an instant, we think that smoking a cigarette would be soo good for us, oh so good? What about acting out aggressively - for a moment, we might think that is good for us because it might rid us of an extremely difficult and frustrating situation.

Some of us can make decisions about what is good for us, and what is not good for us. But how those decisions are made is still extremely elusive. Some kids who live on the street seem to know what is "good" for them, while others engage in activities that are somehow not productive, dangerous, and risky yet there is an instant gratification that is quickly associated with that behavior.

I am trying to decide if I should have questions in my survey about deliberation and negotiation. Perhaps if kids have a high self-efficacy when it comes to being able to deliberate, negogiate, and communicate in a way that brings them psychological advantages, we could understand how kids make decisions around what's good for them, and what's not good for them.

Answering Why

Research, especially social science qualitative research, is wrought with personal biases and subjectivities that tint our analytic interpretations. And since my dissertation uses a mixed method approach - but mostly qualitative - I need to be particularly reflexive and attentive to the process: how I'm feeling about my data and participants, how I'm relating to them, and how these views are informing my analyses.

I've maintained that in the social sciences, maybe particularly in psychology, we study what we study because of some personal connection to the topic. My need to understand vulnerability and resilience in children, especially among children in seemingly the most dire situations, comes from a desperate drive to want to do something; it's a frustration that comes from realizing my privilege perhaps, and hoping that there's something I can do or understand that can better my participants' situations AND my own life. But the research has now become about understanding motivation and achievement in these kids who we are probably too quick to assume lack the skills to be allowed to achieve and succeed in a society that quickly shuns and stigmatizes them. I feel strange wanting to study vulnerability; something always seemed very wrong about that. So instead I decided I wanted to study resilience, but that hardly seemed like a solution to the root of this problem. This idea of motivation to achieve is the personal connection.

All my life, all I've known and learned is how to achieve. I've somehow learned well how to motivate myself to "achieve." And "achieve" for what sake? Often, for the praise of family, for recognition, and simply, to prove that I can do it. Achievement has not been necessary for me to survive, but it has been necessary for me to prove myself - for better or for worse. But, my participants' perceptions of achievement are along the lines of acquiring the skills necessary for basic survival. Basic Survival. We're not talking Yale and Harvard. We're talking, do I have enough food to eat, and can I protect myself from an attacker.

So I enter my dissertation with this bias - this varied definition and reason for achievement. Why are we motivated to achieve? For what reasons? When we are successful, what does that mean? When are we satisfied? When we are not motivated, why is that? Where do our hopes and dreams come from? How sure are we that we can attain those hopes and dreams? Do we have it within ourselves to realize them, or are we dependent on other sources?

Here is the beginning of the reflexive process, one that will be iterative, growing, and continual over the next several months.