It's been sort of a rollercoaster for me as I started off in July writing my project and collecting questionnaire responses (oh I will rant about this soon), then I decided to leave my project half completed and jetted off to Corfu with my friends and boyfriend at the end of July and came back nice and brown at the beginning of August and launched straight into my project again and here I am now still doing this project with the deadline looming.
So let's start from July, not sure if I've rambled on about this before but I possibly have the worst project supervisor in the whole world of education. I don't even care if she reads this somehow because I would love to let her know how utterly shite she is at doing her job as a supervisor. She doesn't answer emails promptly even though she knows how close my deadline is. At our meetings she offers her supposedly unwavering support for me because she knows the struggles I've been through from failing my proposal and not being able to start my project nice and early because I didn't even have a solid research question until July - but I have yet to see much support from her apart from answer my emails about meeting up. She feeds me useless information that I already know and doesn't offer to help with analysing my results together or even trying to explain to me what my methods of analysis are and how it relates to my question. I prepare well for these meetings, printing out 17 pages of SPSS output ready to discuss with her but she just rambles on about my methods and my progress and how "behind" I am (I'm actually not that behind in comparison to others in my course) and I fail to get anything productive out of the meeting. Anyway, long story short, I've ended up having to read about 100 different articles on factor analysis to try and draw some sort of pattern between my research question and the method because she wouldn't let me change my method of analysis as she deems it's "way too late to think that I have the wrong analysis method" (how hard is it to run a regression or another analysis on SPSS?). But finally, I've gotten somewhere at least in terms of analysis and interpretation with 0 help from my useless supervisor.
As you might know, I was collecting responses via questionnaire - it's literally the hardest thing to do if you're not choosing a demographic that is widely available, let me tell you that. Despite all the worries and tears and blood and sweat from me trying to get the relevant people to answer my questionnaire, I got 75 responses which is more than I expected. Ran analyses and it was just about the acceptable level for sample size. I was overjoyed, could literally dance-around-the-room-by-myself-for-30 minutes type of overjoyed. Hurdle 1 of this project was surpassed. So then it got to the analysis part, I literally had a mental breakdown the day before yesterday because I had no idea how my research question can be answered by this method of analysis, must've spent 10 hours trawling through the internet for an answer. Stopped by a statistics forum for help and some guy started ridiculing my use of statistical language and claimed I was "lacking understanding" and "perhaps I should read more on factor analysis before attempting it", man fuck you. Seriously, I'm at a stats HELP FORUM for HELP, I never claimed I understood factor analysis or the language associated with it, I was asking for explanations and advice not whether I'm using statistical language correctly or not. Jeez. This is why I hate people. Internet people.
Anyway, some nice guy managed to explain to me what I wanted to know and then he suggested using a different type of factor analysis (I knew there was 2 but the other one needs a special program that I didn't have). Tried using this program called R and I literally uninstalled it the second a blank white text/code box came up when I ran it. As if I have time to learn coding on top of finishing my project. Found a simpler one called AMOS and it involves drawingggg! I loved it, thought it was great fun and once you draw the diagram you just click calculate and it gives you all the stats and diagrams. Awesome. Then I had trouble understanding what the figures meant and just ended up changing my research question around to suit the method. Sigh. Now my life feels 40% easier than before. Now I'm FINALLYYYY at the discussion chapter of my project and have decided to call it a day.
Wish I could've used this post to talk about my holiday in Corfu but I just had to get all this ranting out before I continue my project. All this pent up anger towards my useless supervisor, all this worry about failing my project, falling at the last hurdle, not meeting the deadline, spending days on reading about factor analysis rather than progressing with the word count on my project was definitely NOT good for my mental stability.
Other than that, I welcome myself back to Blogger :)
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