Thesis Progress

For those of you who have been in the loop on my master's thesis saga, here's the latest news and something worth posting. I finally finished gathering and coding all of my data in mid-July, and my committee chair recommended that I visit with an on-campus stats tutor to get some help analyzing the data. I met with this kid for about three hours and he gave me a bunch of SPSS output that had nothing to do with the analyses I had proposed in my prospectus, but I took it anyway and wrote up what I could. My committee chair got back from Japan on August 10 and we met to discuss my progress. He told me what I already knew-the analyses I got from my meeting with the stats tutor were not going to get the job done the way we needed, so we revisited my data again ourselves. Things were looking good until we got to the fourth and last hypothesis. As the tutor and I had discovered, there was a bit of a hitch with the chronology of my variables in this hypothesis, and my committee chair and I couldn't figure it out either.

So we called in the big guns. He contacted the department stats guru and ran one of our proposed solutions by him, to which he responded, "I don't think that's going to work." "That's what I was afraid of," my chair replied. So we set up an appointment with him for the next week. That appointment lasted about three hours and we still didn't have anything I could write up. Fortunately, we were close, and after some theoretical soul-searching, we were in business. I met with my chair again the next morning, we crunched the numbers, and I was off to the races. Sadly, after going through so much to discover the results, I was hoping for a little more to smile about. At this point it looks like none of my hypotheses were supported and the only significant relationships I found on the first trial faded away on the second trial.

In spite of this, I feel fine. Because there's nothing I can do about it at this point, and because I know I did my best gathering the data, I'm moving forward, writing up those unimpressive, albeit informative results, and am hoping to have everything wrapped up and defended in the next few weeks. My chair and I are sending drafts back and forth and while I'm waiting for feedback I'm packing stuff in boxes getting ready for our big move next week.