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Diary of A Research Assistant: Week 8


As it always seems to be, the one assignment that I had an extra week to do because of my professor being at a conference, turned out to be the simplest and easiest of the semester. The folder where we’d been keeping all the information relevant to the case study had become a bit of a dumping ground, with doubles and sometimes triple copies of a single file, and it was now my job to go through it all. This chaos made navigating incredibly difficult and tugged at my Type A tendencies, which were eventually satiated after reorganizing and sifting through every. single. file. It only took up about half the time I would normally spend on the study a week.

Since I found myself with all this extra research-energy, I reached out to my professor who so eagerly gave me the final and most complicated transcript to work on. It was from the oldest interview, meaning that my professor wasn’t totally sure what was going on and didn’t ask to clarify some of the things the interviewees were saying in the meeting. She also didn’t have them go around and introduce themselves, so everyone (besides the one male teacher in the room) was labeled “female teacher” in the transcript of the interview, making my job of labeling who was speaking when nearly impossible.

I brought this up to my professor who said she would try and take care of that part, and to just do what I could. While this assuaged my anxiety I also really wanted the transcript to be done and fully cleaned, which meant that we would be ready to start inputting data into our analysis software. However, I have come to the point to know that this would be too simple, and that there are most definitely still hoops we have to jump through before then.

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