Hello again!
Just a quick update on how the project is going so far…
I met with Helen again on Tuesday 7th October.
We discussed that I’ll be writing my dissertation in the form of a journal article; in particular in the style that articles are written for the ‘Journal of Veterinary Behavior; Clinical Applications and Research’. (http://www.journalvetbehavior.com/)
To do this successfully I’m going to have to read a lot of papers on there to get a feel for how they’re written and then try and have a go at starting mine too. I’m quite happy that I’ll be writing it in the style of a journal article/scientific paper as I think it’s a very useful skill to have.
With regards to my questionnaire I’m hoping to have it completed by the end of October/start of November so I can start gathering data as soon as possible. I had a go on Survey Monkey (see image below) at setting out how I wanted my questions and I now know which options I’ll need to select for certain questions so that it looks right. Once the questionnaire is finished, I’m going to ask a group of friends and family and also maybe post it on Facebook to do a trial run and ask people to record how long it took them to complete it. This is so I can advise people who are filling out the questionnaire for real how long it will take them to do. If I get my questionnaire out by my target time; I should hopefully be able to start analyzing the data by January.
Over the next few days I’m just going to be tweaking how my questions are written so they sound better and doing a bit of research on the subject area I’m researching and reading a few papers from the JVB website.