The (not-so) Straight Road to Research
As I approach the end of my doctoral studies, I was recently asked to give a talk on my journey to the incoming cohort of post-graduate researchers at the University of Glasgow. I decided to approach this presentation as more of a reflection on what I did for my research and what I have learned during this process. It was during this reflection that I realised, nothing in my research had really gone according to plan – it had not gone wrong, but it had certainly gone different.
In my first year of my PhD in Psychology I knew I wanted to study the experiences of international students who are abroad during a time of political or extreme conflict in their home countries. The idea for this project came to me in July 2016 when I had observed the extensive impact an attempted military coup in Turkey had on my Turkish friends and colleagues, despite them living and working in Ontario, Canada. The change in their demeanour, depletion in their mood, and overall disruption in their daily lives, are only some of the many effects I witnessed in my Turkish peers. I wondered to myself, how is possible that this event, which is occurring half a world away, is having such a deep impact? Is it because they know people involved? Is it because they’re familiar with where the demonstrations are happening? Albeit, many of these questions can be chalked up to the fact that I was a young and naïve undergraduate at the time, but there was one thing that I just could not understand: If it was so dangerous in Turkey right now, why was every Turkish person I knew trying to jump on the next flight back? It was this observation that ultimately lead me to choose this topic for my PhD research, not only to understand the whys, but also to try and uncover how people in these situations can be better supported by their host-institutions and communities in such circumstances. Surely the Turkish international student community are not the only ones who have found themselves away from home during a time of conflict.
I arrived at the University of Glasgow in the fall of 2017, ready to research! It didn’t take long before I ran into my first roadblock: gaps in the scholarly literature. You may be thinking, oh, but that’s so great, aren’t PhDs supposed to be oriented at addressing these gaps? Sure, but my problem was bigger than that. In researching the experiences of international students away from home during a time of conflict home countries, I had to scour multiple bodies of scholarly literature to try and establish a foundation from which to conduct my investigation. Specifically, I had to find intersections of the scholarly literature which broke-down international student experiences and expatriate living, with deeply psychological thought, such as coping with trauma or large-scale traumatic events. Not only did I find very little intersection of these concepts, but I also found that these unique experiences which I was investigating were not even widely acknowledged in the psychology literature. In fact, the psychology literature seemed to suggest that if an individual is not present at the time and place of a traumatic event, they are not likely to be considered as having directly experienced the event.
Put simply, if you’re not there, it didn’t happen to you. Given the very real impact I had witnessed on my Turkish colleagues, I knew this understanding in the literature wasn’t the full picture. In the end, through much trial and tribulation, I came up with my own conceptual solution to these gaps – what I call, Remote Trauma. This budding ‘theory’ essentially suggests that a traumatic event can absolutely affect you, even if you are not there, if you have a sense of direct connection or ownership to the components of the event. For example, if your house burns down while on vacation, you have still lost your house, your belongings, your place of ‘home’ – and, despite enjoying bottomless Mai Tais on a blazing hot beach half a world away, you would probably still be devastated.
So, the idea of Remote Trauma, having been created to address a gap in the scholarly literature, was the unforeseen path of my first year as a doctoral researcher. This should have been a good indication of what was to come, like the cosmos was foreshadowing the unique path of my entire PhD, as year two went even more…differently. In year two, I went on to design a two part study to further explore my research topic, and conducted interviews with Syrian, Turkish, and Palestinian students abroad in for study in the UK during War, Coup, and Occupation in their respective home-countries. Not only did recruitment for interviews require some unanticipated analysis to establish the parameters of my ideal sample (in order to identify places which experience ‘the most’ conflict in the world), but two-round of recruitment also had to be employed to get a diverse enough sample. However, these instances pale in comparison to what came during my Quantitative follow-up (where I had to create my own psychometric tool because I couldn’t find an existing one which was appropriate for use in my work – AKA: more gaps in the literature).
As I am now in the process of writing up this behemoth of a thesis (seriously, its over 300 pages!), I feel that the biggest piece of advice I can give to new researchers is to give yourself permission to be creative! Become a master of the dialogue and thought in your field, and mould it to your project’s needs. Remember, things don’t really go wrong in research, they just go different.
Written by Emily-Marie Pachecho, GTA for LEADS