So, I’ve just accepted an offer from King’s College London to start my PhD in October. Professor Anne Marie Rafferty has agreed to be my supervisor. With her help with my proposal, I’ve been very lucky to receive a Doctoral Studentship from the Wellcome Trust.
Writing a research proposal for a funding application is very different to hypothesising a project in your imagination. Suddenly, everything has to be a lot more concrete. Vague ideas about what I planned to do needed to be properly thought through and justified. I found it most difficult to triangulate my sampling methods, collection and analysis for each phase of the project. The National Institute for Health Research has a Research Design Service who gave me excellent advice on how to make all the pieces fit together in sensible ways. Advisors at King’s were also very helpful.
I’ve refined my research question, and it now looks like this: What can we learn from past and present practices of gratitude in healthcare, and how it can enhance the wellbeing of those who give and receive it?
Supporting questions include:
- In what ways is gratitude expressed, received and displayed?
- How do healthcare professionals respond to different forms of expressed gratitude, and what are the contextual factors that shape these responses?
- What role does gratitude have in shaping human relationships in institutional environments?
I’m looking forward to getting going!