Data and Analysis Complete (almost!)

Another month goes by with few postings but progress has been made. I took a week off at the end of May which was the first time I had properly returned to the data since January. Have you ever had that overwhelming feeling of being on an ocean without a boat or a buoyancy aide? That was how I felt to start with and feared drowning under the volume of information.

Rather than writing, that week was spent re-reading the data and refreshing my memory - a frustrating but necessary time but which resulted in a clear plot for writing up the findings. Since then I have taken a further week off work and managed to produce a reasonably comprehensive but condensed set of four data and analysis chapters. The first presents the overall descriptive information of time use before, during and after the focus module . The second uses disaggregated analysis of time against the survey answers to establish trends and peaks in the results. The third reports the findings from the time given to the online learning activities and the final chapter considers the changes in time use experienced by the sample tracked over the succeeding three modules.

I still have about 800 words to write for the last of these chapters but it is substantially complete. Overall I have about 33k words written which is almost 75%. The final hurdle is to write the discussion of the findings and conclusions. I reckon I will need at least one more week of concentrated writing to finish the draft and then a further week or maybe less to mould it all together into its final form. With a fair wind I hope to have the draft finished by the end of July and the final document submitted by early September or earlier if possible.