Hello everyone! As we continued our research this past week, we realized that a lot of our information will be acquired through interviews. Though fracking is a huge issue in our area, there are not a lot of resources for looking through past events surrounding the conflict. We have not been able to find any archives to visit in our area and our digital archives are lacking. I searched through our university’s library archives and our university’s newspaper archives over the weekend and found nothing regarding fracking. I also looked into a nearby town’s newspaper archive, but the only website I could find required a monthly membership to access articles. With this, we recognized that our facts will come from the books we found in the library, but only one book actually focuses on Tioga county. This information paired with a few internet articles will serve as the basis for our website. The rest of the website will be centered around interviews with various individuals. While we have our questions and specific people planned, as well as one interview officially scheduled for later this month, we have hit a bit of a roadblock. After speaking with the head of IRB again on Friday, we learned that there is another form we must fill out regarding informed consent. This form has options for information being kept “anonymous or confidential”. We are required to circle one of the terms, but since neither fit with our project, we have to find time to sit down and talk with the head during this week. The form also states that we must keep our “data” locked in his office throughout the research project. This has potential to be a huge issue for us since it is already difficult to find time during the week to simply drop forms off to his office since our schedules do not mesh with his office hours. Every time we speak with him, something new comes up, so we hope that everything will be resolved this week so we can proceed with our scheduled interview on the 16th. To continue pushing forward with our website, we hope to have student research available to publish on our website. We reached out to multiple students, current and alumni, and hope to hear back from them soon! Currently, the plan is to have the website up and running with all the basics by the weekend. With that completed, we will be able to focus on any IRB issues and our interviews.
Good luck with the IRB forms, and finding good time for the interviews! It is nice that you are all putting in the work ahead of time, so you can plan accordingly. Good luck!
Give you two a lot of credit for dealing with the IRB stuff. But it is what it is and you have to do what you have to do. However, I feel that unlike mine and Shane’s project, yours has a lot more life to it, if that makes sense. Interviewing people and hearing how they feel just makes it more alive than writing a website about a bunch of dead people. Not that one is better than the other but I think choosing a more contemporary topic tends to keep more people interested. Being a history major I know how much people like history and find it interesting… But keep the faith, and remember that the squeaky wheel gets the grease!