As I noted about a week ago, my DBA supervisor had been ill with Covid-19 and then an ear infection took advantage of his weakened immune system, so it was a few weeks before we could talk about my last draft thesis version. He sent me some comments about a week ago that were easy to incorporate and suggested that we talk on Friday about the problems that I saw with analysing the data from the pilot study.
As I told him, these conversations are always very valuable as they include a certain amount of brain-storming as well as giving me a push to continue work on this seemingly never-ending work (at this point I should state that I have exactly one more year to go - if I don't finish by December 2022 then that's that. I also paid tuition for this final year, a process that I don't want to go through again). The conversation brought up two new topics to be looked at - more material for the literature review - but more importantly shone a light on the direction of the research. It is so easy to concentrate on discovering whether and why the enhancements being studied succeeded, but that's not the real question, which is ...
How does the process of developing the enhancement affect the degree of success? Or in other words, would a failed enhancement have succeeded had the process been different/better? What could be done to improve the process in order to improve the probability of creating a successful enhancement?
The above three questions are really one; they're just phrased differently. And anyway, I'll have to translate them into Hebrew before asking them, so the subtleties may get lost (the subjunctive mood barely exists in Hebrew).
This morning, whilst walking the dog, I considered yesterday's conversation. At one stage I was tempted to run another pilot study that would include the above questions, but by our walk's end, I realised that the pilot did what it was supposed to do: check the methodology and suggest questions that weren't asked. The new questions can be asked in the 'real' research.
I'll probably work a few hours today and in the following days incorporating this new material and direction into the thesis. There will also be the new topics to research and possibly write about.
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