Reflection 06

As for most of my classmates, the Honours Project was the first real research project I conducted in the past three years. Accompanied with endless nervousness and excitements, the project started. As one could imagine, the process of conducting this project was not a smooth sailing, instead, filled with all types of difficulties and challenges.

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First I needed to start by figuring out a researchable topic, narrowing it down and choosing a methodological approach. My project title is Gender and Nursing Profession: A Case Study of Chinese male nurses in Guangzhou. Briefly speaking, my research was to study Chinese male nurses regarding their training experience, challenges on masculinities and their career trajectories. Nursing profession has always been dominated by female, as scholars have found out, male nurses have gone through both challenges and advantages for being a small group in this profession. In China, the percentage of male nurses is very low; most of them are concentrated on big cities while in small cities and towns, people can hardly find a male nurse in hospitals. The reason why I chose to conduct a case study was that I would like to have an in-depth study of a unit of male nurses who share particular similar background rather than aimlessly approaching male nurses from different cities and hospitals like fishing for a needle in the ocean. Before I had this topic, I have made several versions of topics which were either too broad or too narrow, so I think it really took quite some time to come up with a good title. One thing may be helpful is that when you have a rough idea about your topic, you should go through related literature based on some keywords of your ideas. I think it will be better than trying to decide on a topic without any support.

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I was stuck by methodology choice at the same time when I had hesitation on deciding my topic. As I have mentioned, I have had several versions of topics and back then, the methodology choice also became part of the reasons why I had the title with “case study.” I have studied how to use SPSS from the preparatory class for Honours Project, however, I am more interested in conducting in-depth interviews. I even made a list of the pros and cons of each methodology to make a comparison between them when I was so uncertain about the one to be chosen. I started to find my answer from previous research. I found out that almost all of them has applied qualitative research methods in their research regarding gender and work. As my purposes were to know more about male nurses, including their experience, their perspectives on several things, qualitative data would be the best of them all. Reviewing previous related research did a lot in helping me figure out my direction, so I highly recommend it.

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Besides, writing a decent literature review was also a torture for most of us at the beginning when we had more than 20 pieces of literature on hand but not a single idea about how to deal with them. My skill for writing literature review was reading, classifying, summarising and integrating. After reading each piece of literature, you may find some important points that are similar or opposite with others’ and these are the things you need to classify. Later you need to summarise what you have got from previous research with your understandings and integrate ideas that can be connected together with a subtitle. The most important thing is to not be afraid of the amount of literature you are reading.

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Frankly speaking, I found myself enjoying the process of interviewing, although I was quite afraid when I conducted the first one. Since I conducted semi-structured interviews, the questions that I prepared on my hand served only as a guideline. I think it is vital to pay attention to what the interviewees said and raise follow-up questions based on their answers.

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One last challenge I encountered was analyzing the qualitative data. I was quite confused and lost when facing the transcripts of tens of thousands of words. Sometimes I thought my analysis was not good enough because it lost connection with my literature review. I feared that the analysis might be too superficial. “Go back to the literature review and have dialogues with it”. It was challenging when I first heard my supervisor saying this. Gradually I found my way to achieve what she taught me. My suggestion on analyzing qualitative data is, first of all, digest your transcripts and highlight those sentences that you find essential. To avoid being too superficial, I think it would be better if you can think twice and try to unfold the inner meaning behind a sentence rather than its literal meaning. It is also necessary to look back to your literature review and establish a connection between it and your analysis.

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It was a fabulous research journey for me with joys and pains as usual as the life it is. I was glad that I spared no efforts on finishing the project, and the best thing out of the whole process was that I got to know more about myself, i.e. both my strengths and limitations.