Weeknotes 10 - Finished and submitted

You can contact me on https://climatejustice.social/@PenguinJunk.

Its been even longer since my last “weeknotes”, and before I launch out on my next exploration, it feels right to draw a line under the series of weeknotes I was writing over the Summer.

I finished and submitted my thesis and await marking. It was an amazing experience working with almost entirely qualitative data.

There was a moment back there, when I stood back from my absorbtion in a spreadsheet of words - the indicators of different behavioural influences that I was extracting from the interviews - when I deeply doubted the validity of my approach (there were actually many such moments, but this one was most poignant). I almost immediately recalled the quantitative data that I am extremely familiar with:

• The accuracy assessments using “ground truth”, which is so often a massive fudge on the reality;
• The resulting numbers that are given meanings and interpretations, which so often hide the biases of the interpretors and their research;
• The way that quantitative data ignores anything that cannot be measured, which is the vast majority of what is important.

I immediately felt better. My qualitative approach was not hiding truths in numbers but exposing them as words. As such, I feel like my final report is itself a dataset - moreso than any report I ever wrote summarising previous research. I am waiting for a mark but I have also asked those who advised me if its worth trying to publish this research. I would love to share these findings further.