Jan 22 meeting minutes

In our Jan 22 meeting, a number of problems relating to writing the dissertation at various stages were raised, they are:

1. Difficulty finding the right papers, journal articles related to one's study. Things we need to check such as are we looking in the right database? Are we using the right keywords for search? Some people suggest that we can book an appointment with an librarian to shape up our information searching skills

2. Strategies for reading/writing in the beginning. We can start by reading without a clear purpose, which takes longer but will allow one to have a broader understanding on topics. We can also start by reading with clear purpose such as reading in order to finish writing a chapter. A chapter outline will help in this case, to focus your reading on specific topics. This way is more efficient, but will certainly narrow your perspective.

3. Transcribing and translating non English medium data. Since most of the group memebers' data will come from Chinese language sources, such as interviews, the question was do we need to translate all the data into English in the very beginning. This is actually not necessary, even during the data analysis stage. You should analyze your data in its most raw/original format. And not until you are going to write about them, then you select the segments you need to demonstrate in your paper and translate them into English.

4. How to write a good discussion and conclusion based on the analysis findings. Some suggest that we may need further reading, and revisit our original research questions to find a focus for the paper conclusion.

Iris made a good suggestion that for future meetings, we can pick a particular theme to talk about, such as how to write a good lit review. The idea was to spend the 1st half of the meeting to report our progress, then the 2nd half to discuss the selected theme. So for our next meeting, the group has decided that we find some material or info on how to conduct good information search. If you have personal experience or you have come across material that you think would be useful for our next meeting theme, please do bring them with you next time!