Methods Encounters

As part of my project is a historical analysis between government response in the 1976 Ebola Outbreak and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in order to compare government responses then and now in Belgium and USA I thought I had a strong case by depending a lot on the responses and records by the researchers on the field at the time, from Belgium and CDC USA. Except I realize that then by depending on their accounts for a fair comparison I had to get records and responses from researchers on the field in 2014, and I couldn't depend as heavily on statistics from 2014 without having comparable statistics in 1976. Which the ministry of Public Health in Belgium says doesn't exist. So I'm back to square one.

While starting to write up everything this week, I realized that the data I had for Spain's ethnic diversity didn't match up with the data I had for France's level of ethnic diversity.  Basically the data I had for France was correct (people had put down their ethnicity on the French census that accounts for the entire population) but the data I had for Spain was only the ethnicities and/or nationalities of the immigrant population of Spain.  I googled and went on databases and tried everything (even did the AU librarian chat) to see if the information was out there.  Finally got a copy of the Spanish census questions.  And they don't even ask for people to report on their ethnicity, only their nationality if they hold citizenship status in another nation or have dual citizenship.  Which is not the entirety of the Spanish population.  I was so frustrated and am now positive that that data does not actually exist unless it's classified, which wouldn't make ...

Kimmy Baggelaar Professor Seybert SISA 306 19 July 2017 Comment: I am realizing that integrating boys into women's education has only recently been around and the conclusions I am drawing about gender relations are involving societal norms (violence against women and female employment) but I feel like the generation in school and the generation in the workplace are different... does that make sense? In order to circumvent this I wasn't sure what to do...How I plan to overcome this is: I can slightly alter my variables or I can gear my essay to say that integrated education perpetuates these societal norms. I want this to stay current and relevant. I am in the final stretch. My final variables are domestic violence towards women and female employment in order to quantify gender equality. I decided to add in some ethnographic content into this research in order to make sure I make it clear that gender equality is a subjective term and means something different in these...

    In all honesty, I'm actually making semi-okay progress with the discourse analysis part of my project. The biggest obstacle to me getting that part done is the fact that Nvivo appears to have been created by none other than Satan himself. It's not at all straightforward, the AU client software is terrible, the whole thing just stops working at random, and I've already had to start over once because the client doesn't make it at all clear where you're saving something and doesn't have a working search function to find it. That being said, I did find a tutorial and I feel like I might actually be about to start getting somewhere with it. I also had more success than I thought I would with finding data on fatalities and compiling that into a spreadsheet and getting the numbers I needed with it. ALSO I'm going to be eternally kicking myself because I didn't go through the IRB thing to actually get cleared to interview people because I didn't think th...

Hello friends and fans, I'm back with an update on my mental well-being and research project! As of late I have been going through the academic programs of Nigerian universities one at a time because the idea of compiling any sort of data has yet to catch on there. In addition, I have emailed the entire Nigerian space program inquiring as to their actual funding and staff size. Neither of these arduous task have yet to prove fruitful but for the sake of my 306 project I need them to do so immediately. I have never been one to promote the idea of American exceptionalism but this project is pushing me to the brink when comparing the ease of sorting through US data to the nonexistent data of Nigeria. As far as solutions go, I am proud to say that including the concept of marketization into my project has allowed me to account for states selling their space technology and capabilites to other states or private companies. Now states like China and Russia can exist happily in my research...

Probably the biggest change on my project in the last week was my switch to statistics. Although I was planning to do content analysis for my project, I realized that statistics would most likely lead to a less biased look at my research question. The statistics I'm looking at so far include population, which is a constant, and year that the state's constitution was ratified, which is my independent variable. For my dependent variable, I am looking at the average years of schooling a woman receives in a given country versus the total amount received. I could not find a variable for men's education to compare it with, so I have been looking at women versus total. In theory, having an older constitution should create a more established regime which would have better norms in place for gender equality. I've decided to look at the forty most populous countries, as that should give me a large enough N to generalize. I am planning to do regression analysis to examine the ...

Secession is Messy...and so is Research Since my last post, I've really been working hard on trying to get my research from one point to the next- from a hypothesis to my logical conclusion. I also keep having to make sure I keep my research is is original, instead of making the mistake of drawing on too much of other people's ideas. I understand the point is to draw from other people's ideas, however, it gets hard sometimes to not let so much research convince you that your own hypothesis is wrong. I think this is where research is messy. It's not the formatting, it's trying to articulate your own ideas that you have taken so much time trying to come up with. So the question becomes- what do I do about it? I have figured out that sometimes you need to just make an outline or step away from your research, or maybe even just go back and do some editing. You just need a breather from reading so many other research articles because they  will  get mixed up in ...

I have been procrastinating so much on this paper. I am enjoying Europe so much and I'm having the time of my life so my main focus has not been on my paper. This is going to change since all my friends will be working the next week and I will be in a foreign country alone where I don't speak the language. I now have my priorities in order and will be spending the next month focusing on the paper. If anyone has some tips to get me to stop procrastinating though please let me know. I will be honest in saying I have made minimal effort on my paper this far but please check back next week.

It is getting down to the final stretch and I am starting to have a better picture of how my final paper is going to look. The hardest thing to accomplish at this point in the game is just making myself sit down to write and figuring out where everything needs to go. I've been struggling with trying to place all the parts of my research into the right area but also making everything fluid. I feel relatively confident in the data I have collected (and am still collecting) but its really just making a pages of notes flow into a coherent research paper. I've found that it is helpful to read other research papers, especially from Clocks and Clouds, so I get a better understanding of how to compose the data collection, analysis, and conclusion portion of the paper. It has been helpful to be reading undergraduate papers, instead of papers from the top scholars in IR, because it is more encouraging to say the least. Now I just have to dedicate time every day to work on the paper and i...

Kimmy Baggelaar Professor Seybert SISA 306 Comment: I thought that Brussels was supposed to be the point in time that I would have the majority of the contents of my essay figured out, but as it turns out, that is not the case. For the rest of this week, I am traveling from country to country and then I will be able to settle down and get a better picture about everything down on paper. Since my first post, I have changed one of my variables to female political participation as a sign of gender equality in a region and discarded child mortality rate (because I was considering going a public health route of what gender equality means) but now I am making more direct connections "quantifying my qualitative variables" and such. I will give a more thorough update when I am back in the States. Thank you for bearing with me.