I had my Thesis Outline Approval meeting today which seemed to go really well. The committee work incredibly enthusiastic about my ideas and very encouraging about what I had written so far. They did, of course, find some areas where their thoughts and improvements could be made. They suggested that it might be more useful to get my student participants together in focus groups rather than relying solely on 1:1 interviews. This will allow me to open a discussion on the process of reading and allow for people to make comparisons between the ways they do things. It might also be a much more efficient way of collecting insights into how my participants go about their reading.

My main issue at the moment is how to get enough (but not too many) participants. Recruitment into the project has been very slow. It was not helped by the fact that my Brighton University e-mail address got cut off the day after I had sent out my first recruitment literature, and using this e-mail address as a contact point. Unfortunately, I had not had my Annual Progression Review. A fairly severe period of depression in the late spring/early summer meant that I asked for it to be postponed, and then we all seems to forget that it needed doing. My fault, really. I should have picked up on it earlier. Anyway, but has now been resolved and I am reregistered as a part-time PhD student at Brighton.

Recruitment at both the institutions I am studying has been very slow. I am hoping to go into some lectures this week to meet students and make a personal appeal. One of the areas which the TOA committee picked up on was whether or not the students who are engaged in this study will be unfairly advantaged. As the fact that talking to me might help them with their studies is one of the few advantages which I can present to potential participants, I was not really able to get a satisfactory reply.

The other issue for me at this stage is lack of time. It's been a really busy teaching term for me at Chichester. I'm hoping that there will now be some space which will allow me to get back to doing my own reading. I think I'd like to look at some methodological material.