Journal Entry #9

I have been repenting during the last two days, and I have gone back and read the four articles assigned during class that I neglected to review during the bustle of the last two weeks. They were extremely helpful and very well chosen, and while I was reading them I took some notes about some of the main points. Most important to me were the sections taken from Babbie's book and the article "Monochronic and Polychronic Time" by Hall. And just as a disclaimer, I apologize for my thoughts being somewhat scattered here.

Comments on "Reading and Writing Social Research":

I must create an organized study of the previous literature concerning my topic of study in Great Britain. I am concerned that my study be "an extension of what has previously been learned about a particular topic".

-In doing so, I must create a list of key concepts that I would like to study.
-Read cited sources on papers or articles that I find useful. This is the "snowball sampling" technique.
-Study the "Evaluations of Research Reports" in thinking about my research project in England. My project needs to be good.

Comments on "Qualitative Field Research and Research Design":

I must decide what the focus of my project will be: to explore, to describe, or to explain.

I need to decide how I will go about my study and research, and I must do it in the next few weeks. I have to prepare that research proposal...

A good place to start for the research proposal would be to outline what questions I'll be studying and how I will go about answering them. I can create a framework for my research by coming up with statements that I want to be able to make when my research is complete.

After that, I need to clarify what I mean by the concept of religiosity.

How tightly structured will my research be? At this point, I see my research as being somewhat open-ended. The idea is to discover the "different dimensions, aspects, or nuances" about my topic (declining religiosity in the UK). As is said by Babbie in ch. four of her text, "the research itself may uncover and report aspects of social life that were not evident at the outset of the project". That's what I want to do.

Comments on "Monochronic and Polychronic Time":

We talked a lot about these concepts in class on Monday, and I have to say it really helped me synthesize my experience in Brazil as an LDS missionary. Truly, the brazilian people work on a polychronic sense of time, and only the very elite and highly educated do not. I noticed that the concept of getting home by 9:30 because it was a mission rule was hard to understand (or, at least very easy to gloss over) for many church members, native missionaries, and normal brazilians that we taught. If there was an important lesson or event going on, the 9:30 M-time rule didn't seem to matter any more. The longer I was there, the more I came to adopt the P-time way of "doing everything at once", and I can honestly say that I really enjoy it. Maybe P-time is more common in our day and age of texting, reading newspapers, doing homework, and managing a dozen open tabs on our web browsers all at the same time. Still, regardless of how much P-time slips in, the clock-in, clock-out of M-time still governs our society, and I personally love being able to put aside time for one specific activity. Compartmentalizing can also be a solution for sanity.