WEEK 4 –Different direction
I feel very warm for the many helpful suggestions I received from the last two blogs, and I gradually feel more relaxed to write a blog to record my thoughts and share with them even if I think some of them are very indecisive and unclear. But it is so moving to find many classmates have a similiar indecisive process but still work hard to take action.
Current Thoughts about Final Project
As I mentioned in the last blog, I really interested in focusing on the mental health of people beacuse of China’s current epidemic prevention policy. But this is a too wide topic and now I want to narrow down it and pay attention to the studetns in university.
Now in china, many universities will close schools if there is an outbreak of a pandemic in the local area, and students are not allowed to go out of school except for emergencies. The closure often lasts a long period, like 2 months. I think this would unavoidably have a negative influence on students’ mental health. Generally, students in university are all adults, but they have restricted freedom just because they live in dormitories. Maybe there is also some inequality problem about it. So I would like to carry out an online questionnaire survey which is mainly about anxiety and depression of students during the closure period and could use some statistical methods and building models to analyze data. But I have many concerns. After all, this topic is a little bit sensitive. I am not sure whether it would be banned in Chinese media. So I have not started to design my questionnaire.
Besides, many thanks for that Juli encouraged my initial ideas about combining investment and mental health and provided some inspiration with me. I read the article recommended by Juli “Disciplining investment bankers, disciplining the economy: Wall street’s institutional culture of crisis and the downsizing of “corporate america”. Although I did not have too much inspiration about investment and mental health, I was inspired about other aspects.
This article focuses on financial crises and corporate downsizing in the US and shed light on the figure of the downsized investment banker, which reminds me of widespread Internet company downsizing in China. After reading related liturate, I found that this topic contains many inequality problems about employees’ mental health and even physical health( the sudden death of an employee in ByteDance).
I also want to try this topic, but I am a little bit confused about the research methods, maybe qualitative ethnographic or netnographic research might be a suitable approach? I should describe/explore how people have experienced increased poor mental health (thanks for Cajsa`s suggestion from the comment of the last blog). But I used to do a lot of quantitative researches in the postgraduate and applying different statistical methods to analyze data and draw conclusions, which is just the way I feel familiar and comfortable with. So I do not have too much experience of qualitative ethnographic or netnographic research, and I hope to learn more about the procress and steps of such researches, and some some dos and don’ts. Maybe this is the promary thing that I need to pay attention to in the next few weeks. Then I will collect some related interviews and survey of the Internet employees` as the document of my research.
Ethnographic research is qualitative research on a group of people and their behaviors and social interactions within their own, native environment. It involves studying people in context, mainly making observations rather than focusing on hard data and numbers.
That`s all I have now. Thanks for reading here.
I conducted a questionnaire research on Chinese queer women’s reception of queer media, and I did not meet censorship when I posted the questionnaire on my social media accounts in China. I hope that could give you an ease of mind if you decide to use this method. I would also recommend to contact influencers who are interested in / post relevant information. If they could help you to advertise the research, it could attract more people to fill in the questionnaire.
Oh, thank you so much, hanyu. It is very helpful and makes me feel more relaxed. I would like to inquire are there some effective ways for me to contact influencers because I also tried it but did find useful access. Many thanks.
What if instead of looking at a bunch of universities, you focused on one or a few universities? This approach gives you the opportunity to maybe find a university that has a mental wellness program in place (or is interested in starting one) and wants to know where it would be most useful to invest its resources to benefit the students in lockdown (since it really doesn’t look like these lockdowns are going to end anytime soon).
I am sorry for the late reply. Thank you so much, and the suggestion is so helpful and inspired me. I will try to focus on mental health programs in universities and find some related research, maybe which can give me more insights. And I can also try to reach out to the universities that I am familiar with in China.
Both your project ideas sound important and interesting and suitable for a Futures Project for EFI. It sounds like you have more clarity on the university students and mental health during lockdown topic, and possibly better research access too.
If you wanted to develop your qualitative skills alongside conducting quantitative methods, I would suggest looking at the Research Training Centre at the School of Social and Political Science — they have many short courses available to EFI students. Perhaps you could build in some ‘freeform’ / open text questions into your survey, or you could conduct interviews or focus group discussions separately. It’s good to build on your current skills while also gaining some new ones.
Hanyu’s and Theresa’s suggestions are both great ways to narrow down your focus and gain better access to more potential research subjects. When you design your survey, especially focusing on something like mental health, it’s especially important to reflect on research ethics, and make sure that your research methods are not creating new pressures for your participants. How will you make sure you’re taking care of the wellbeing of your participants? Perhaps something like focus group discussions have the double benefit of giving you good qualitative data, and also providing a forum for students to share their experiences with one another and realise they’re not alone in this. We’ll talk about research ethics further in the third group supervision session.