day to recover from

some days are setbacks . . . or at least so little forward movement was made that is seems that way. today was almost that bad :).

as I was entering the data from the "non-basic" emotion words used in the focus groups. I noticed a couple of things. one, I had actually made far more groups than I had estimated yesterday at the end of the job. instead of 8-10 there were actually 16 -- plus a fairly healthy handful (~20?) of words that did not really fit into any of these categories. next, and I think I have yoonhwa to blame for this revelation, just calculating the averages and sums does not really show what happened across cultures and within groups in the discussion of these concepts. what if one group talked about schadenfreude a lot, but none of the rest of them did? does that make it invalid? if all of the groups talked about anger about with the same frequency, does that make it more salient? a "qualified" yes to both questions, and the qualification is that it is fairly easy to imagine exceptions to each rule. an obvious structural research design example is how the weigookin got to discuss a summary of what the koreans had said. if they had not already discussed some item in the korean summary, they would after in the discussion of the summary. so precisely where in the north american focus groups discussion the item occurs matters.

then the bad things started to happen :)

do you know how annoying it is to reroll a roll of toilet paper? neither do I, but rerolling half a roll of toilet paper is a real pain--and it barely fit back on the roller. since every four year-old is required to unroll at least one roll of toilet paper, that alone should be reason not to have another child after the oldest gets to be four.

potentially newly minted phrase of the day: "toddler inertia"
a toddler in motion tends to stay in motion. a toddler at rest tends to stay at rest.
you know how they don't want to go to day care, but at the end of the day, they don't want to come home? man, it was hard to get yoojin out of the house today. but the minute he got up on my shoulders, everything was ok.

of course following rapidly on the heels of that event, the cell phone fell out of my pocket. really hard to meet up with people nowadays without a cell phone . . . we used to be able to do it, but now we are dependent on the cellie. the person meeting me got to talk with the bus driver. daejeon city bus terminals seem to be way-the-heck-out-in-nowhere.

and what day would be complete without an accident . . . after being awakened from a doze in the back seat of the car when arriving at costco and being placed in a shopping cart. actually kind of convenient . . . he was sitting down, so it shot straight down through the shopping car onto the parking lot . . . wonder if anyone walked through that? another fortunate thing was the fancy hand dryer in the costco. was able to rise out yoojin's underpants and get them pretty dry pretty quickly. of course, the other dude in the bathroom did not get to dry his hands.

no real energy to do more when we got home, got the groceries put away and got some dinner eaten.

still lots left to do:

• conduct a secondary coding of the data.
• code the different behavioral characteristics: kinesic, proxemic, or whatever.
• look at how the participants coded the basic emotions and of their intensity.
• outline chapter 4
  
• revise the methodology section regarding data collection and data analysis.
• look at the edits for the first three chapters.
• write my advisor.
• contact the program and register for courses.

still I did do something today.