Our Cat!

I was struck by a thought as I walked back from University on a wet cold Adelaide winter’s day.

Are Cyclists like Cats on a Rainy day?

On rainy days our cat wanders from window to window seeing if it is raining outside each. I found myself effectively doing the same on my walk home. It wasn’t raining behind me which was towards the coast but it was in the hills which were in front of me. So, maybe a flat ride might be OK? Then once home the sun was shining out to the north – maybe that was the direction for a ride?

In any event, shortly thereafter the wind came up, the clouds took over and down came the rain. Like our cat everywhere I looked there was no respite. Another day without a ride.

As a result, just 25kms on the bike in the last 10 days but it has enabled me to spend hours and hours on my thesis. Not a bad thing as a recent discussion with the Honours Co-ordinator confirmed that I have just 12 weeks to finish it. With that thought has come the first hint of panic. Until that meeting I’d felt there was plenty of time but actually there isn’t! Now all those delays in the conduct of my interviews due to it being an early Vintage, my work wind down and the thought that I had plenty of time so there was no hurry have all come home to roost!

My Literature Review and Research Methods sections are in pretty good shape and my data is more or less coded or so I thought until I ran the network software and got an unintelligible mess!

So with the weather being utter rubbish I went back to the data to see if I could make it more intelligible. A serious cull of my data is required. In one sense that’s easy – just remove “stuff” but what “stuff”? After all I had selected it in the first place because I thought it was important but now I’m saying some has to be removed. How do I justify its removal?

The good news is that apparently I’m not the first to face this problem. My supervisor pointed me to the literature including a piece he’d written that provides a logical basis to attack the problem. So again with the weather making riding impossible I have set about a recoding excercise.

Hopefully when re-entered into the network software it will reveal five or six “nice” clusters from which themes will be easily identifiable and from there my findings will emerge!

Also posted in WordPress Daily Prompt