Blogs as a study tool

This public blog is just one of four tools I am using to pull my Masters research together.

I started with a private wiki and then began blogging also, but was worried about anonymity issues so had access locked down to just myself and my research supervisor.

The real research is happening in NVivo, but I find that I do a lot of my thinking better in a blog than a analytic memo, so I started interchanging the two. If a memo was about a specific data or participant then in went into NVivo and was linked, but the more general thoughts about underlying cause/efect relationships, theories in the literature and in use by the participants to make sense of their environments...they end up in the blog.

More and more though, I find the challenge of writing for public consumption adds something of an edge to the process of analysis so many of the recent posts have been to this blog rather than my private one.

Today I found somebody also using blogs for research. Lilia Efimova is completing her PhD and using a blog to do it. I commented today on her post about how the messiness of blogs can help a researcher conduct their work. I will have to visit her blog more often.