This week I need to concentrate on working with the results of my research questionnaire.  This morning I have spent a good three hours doing that, albeit with a half hour break after the first two in order to make, spill and mop up a mug of tea!  Note to self, large mugs full of tea, cluttered desks and the search for a pencil sharpener (failed) do not go together all that well.

My questionnaire was quite long and it was mostly qualitative - in hindsight that may not have been so clever for many reasons:

• anyone suffering from fatigue or going through intense treatment would struggle to get through it (unfortunately the £200 version of the software didn't allow partial responses to be saved and revisited - bah)
• tick boxes are much, much quicker to collate and interpret, and would possibly have given answers that more directly the questions I thought I was asking - as it is I find that the answer to what I menat in, say, question 7 is actually given at question 15, or vice versa.
• Exporting the results to suitable software to do any electronic searching, whilst possible, is not ideal - I seem to spend a lot of time reformatting the results to make them legible/usable.
• A lot of time is needed to correct typos, not because I feel a need to but (a) because if it is ever published and I have quoted someone I don't want them to feel embarrassed if they recognise themselves and (b) someone left a comment about my own typos and gramamtical errors, maybe tongue in cheek, but I found it hurtful and lacking empathy.
• I'm sure there are others but I forgot them - that's not me being flippant, it's something that remains true: I still find, after all this time that ideas fall out of my head before I can write them down; that as I reach the point in the sentence where I need to put the 'good word' I have forgotten it and can't find it; that my brain may be 90% recovered but the 10% that's addled was actually rather useful.

At the moment I am undertaking a largely mechanistic approach, bringing into dialogue snippets from my own experience with the questionnaire replies.  It is proving interesting and lots and lots of thoughts, ideas  and questions are finding their way onto one of the few pieces of paper that escaped the tea-deluge (poor old BPW got drowned (baptised in tea?)for the second time since I bought it back in 1999).  I am sure there are more creative and more interesting things that could/should/will be done, but for now it's a case of plodding on... well as much as I can when Holly decides to lend her assistance to the procedings: