Numberless, Cardless Thank You Cards
There’s an old saying about it taking a village to raise a child. While I don’t yet have experience to say whether this is true, I do know that it also takes a village to complete a dissertation. Or at least, it does when you’re a graduate student studying health communication in a fantastic academic department that is, unfortunately, not affiliated with a medical school, nursing school, hospital, public health department, or any other place in which you might be able to tap into existing networks to work with clinical populations.
Although I haven’t been able to send thank you cards to everyone who has helped me out so far (or anyone lately, because I packed them up three weeks ago and they’re being held hostage by Lion Transportation, Inc., the worst moving company ever, with the rest of our stuff), I do want to take the time here to acknowledge the seemingly endless number of people who have given me assistance on this project so far. Here are a bunch of little shout outs (i.e., numberless, cardless Thank You Cards) in somewhat sequential order:
1. Thank you to ISBER at UCSB for funding my formative survey about the stressors that cancer survivors face, as well as the ways in which they use media to cope with stress. This grant allowed me to compensate my amazing participants. This survey has provided me with a much deeper, much more nuanced understanding of my population of interest. It’s been invaluable.
2. Once the survey was online, it was a matter of finding people to take it. This is where I’ve needed (and received) a ton of help.
a. Thank you to organizations such as Susan G. Komen, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, Young Survival Coalition, FORCE, and the National Breast Cancer Foundation that allowed me to post a description of my study on their message boards.
b. Thank you to agencies such as Susan G. Komen (and its many affiliates), The Wellness Community (and its many affiliates), Gilda’s Club (and its many affiliates), and the Santa Barbara Breast Cancer Resource Center, all of which let their patrons know about my study by posting a flyer, sending out a mass e-mail, Tweeting, or putting it in their Facebook status. SO helpful!
c. A giant thank you to Pam Stephan at About.com’s breast cancer resource page, who wrote about my study as part of her newsletter and by doing so generated a lot of interest for me. The morning that her newsletter appeared online, I opened my inbox to find about 30 e-mails from people volunteering to complete the survey. How wonderful! Pam’s readers are fantastic.
d. Thank you to my friends, family, and colleagues who’ve promoted my study via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, e-mails, or any other means of communication.
e. Thank you to colleagues who’ve been generous with their advice on finding and recruiting participants. I’ve learned, in particular, from Dr. Segrin, Dr. Smith, and the future Dr. Joseph.
3. The biggest thank you to all of the breast cancer survivors who have provided thoughtful, interesting responses on this survey. I have learned so much from everyone who has completed it and these responses have informed my future work to an even greater extent than I could have imagined. Additionally, I’ve also appreciated the words of support and encouragement that many of them offered, as well as the comments or suggestions about the survey. I feel extremely fortunate to have “met” so many interesting, inspiring people through my schoolwork.
4. Then there’s my other pretest, which is an evaluation of video clips for potential inclusion as stimuli in my dissertation. For this, I need to pretest at least 60 video clips, and each clip needs to be evaluated by at least 20 people (don’t worry, I don’t force anyone to watch all 20. I offer them in packs of 6). This pretest is about to wrap up, too, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of:
a. My friend and fellow grad Katy, who offered extra credit to her students for finding videos that fit two important categories. This generated a ton of clips, many of which I pretested. It was extremely helpful!
b. My research assistant Tiffany for scouting out more clips. (I probably ruined YouTube for her for life. Sorry ‘bout that, Tiffany!).
c. My husband Tom for figuring out how to download the clips, store them, and upload them so they could be imbedded in an online survey. Awesome husband! This would have taken me…a year to do? (Sadly, I doubt I’m exaggerating.) He’s the best.
d. Professors (like my advisor) who offered extra credit to their students to take my pretests.
e. Friends who just became professors this Fall and offered my study as extra credit to their students (Dr. Choi!).
f. Friends Katy (again), Tom (again), Amber, Bekah, Andrea, and Allison, who took a pretest and because they’re nerds (I say this with affection), many of them pointed out things I could tweak within the video/survey to make for a smoother experience for participants. Thank you also to Kim, Hazel, Ellen, and Jimmy for taking a later version of the pretest.
So there you have it. About a million people—friends, family, strangers, survivors, advocates, etc.— have helped me with my dissertation already, and this is just the formative work before the Big Show gets underway this Fall. You can likely expect another post of me profusely expressing my gratitude to those who will lend a hand in the future with that project.
Lastly, to the one guy who takes surveys for income and somehow found my survey the first day it went live and took it 50 times in the span of 20 minutes with fake responses and computer-generated e-mail addresses even though it was explicitly for breast cancer survivors and you’re not one: you’re not getting compensation, so stop e-mailing me about it.
