Not so confident!

Hey again!

So I'd mentioned in my last post that I was going to talk about my dissertation/applied experimental idea but things have ballsed up slightly, so I'll not be doing that today. For some bizarre reason my brain did not click that applied experimental means that I will have to do a purely quantitative report and the idea I have for my dissertation is qualitative. Which sucks because I really wanted to do the same idea for both so that I could gain better insight into what I needed to do and to be honest, be able to make the mistakes now rather than in my actual dissertation. Anyway, I now need to think of a new idea for applied experimental.

I spoke to Alessandro (module leader for applied experimental) and he said he would quite happily give me an idea for work in the visual perception area, and I DO have an interest for that, but to be honest I want to something within the mental health field (or even something to do with autism/aspergers). One reason being that my main goal is to be a clinical psychologist, so I want to keep my work as clinical/mental health as possible, and I don't think I could work on something that I didn't have passion for. I know it's not actually carrying out the research in this module, that it's all just layout, method and idea...but I really don't think I could work if I was bored. I'm bad enough as it is for putting off work, I don't need the help of being bored doing it too lmao.

I had thought of looking at anorexia, in the sense of do anorexics regard thin people as being happy and having better quality of life than those who are overweight, but part of me thinks that common sense can tell us that yes, they probably do, and so the research would be pointless.

A second idea I'd had, and an idea that I originally came up with earlier in the year when I knew about the extra research module I would be doing, was looking at perceptions of mental health problems in children. So, I would basically be asking adults if they believed that mental health problems (such as depression, bipolar and even schizophrenia) are something that can happen to children, but I have no idea how to make it useful or to find reasons why this would be a beneficial study.

To be honest, I find quantitative methods very restrictive - Yes, it's easy (well, easier than qualitative research in terms of interpreting data) but it is limited in what you can do, at least especially in regards to mental health. I just feel completely baffled and I'm really regretting taking this module, I love research (hence why I took it) but I had forgot how suffocating experimental research makes me feel.

In other news, tomorrow we pick our supervisors! I am shit scared because there is one lecturer who I literally NEED to have has my supervisor so that I can do the research I wanna do and I am going to completely gutted if I don't get her. So, fingers crossed all works out well!

PS. If any one has any sort of advice/help/input/ideas that relate to my topics of interest that they could give me to help figure out a way to do a useful quantitative piece of research, then please get in touch!