A fleet of research possibilities and a scattering of updates

Tomorrow is my first day of my 3rd year as a Masters student in the MLC program at Georgetown University. I’m taking the slowwww route through higher ed, as happens when you work full-time, have two kids and are an only child who lost her mother along the way.

This semester I will [finally] take the class I’ve been borrowing pieces from for the past two years: Ethnography of Communication. I’ve decided to use this opportunity do an ethnography of DC taxi drivers. My husband is a DC taxi driver, so in essence this research will build on years of daily conversations. I find that the representation of DC taxi drivers in the news never quite approximates what I’ve seen, and that is my real motivation for the project. I have a couple of enthusiastic collaborators: my husband and a friend whose husband is also a DC taxi driver and who has been a vocal advocate for DC taxi drivers.

I am really eager to get back into linguistics study. I’ve been learning powerful sociolinguistic methods to recognize and interpret patterning in discourse, but it is a challenge not to fall into the age old habit of studying aboutness or topicality, which is much less patterned and powerful.

I have been fortunate enough to combine some of my new qualitative methods with my more quantitative work on some of the reports I’ve completed over the summer. I’m using the open ended responses that we usually don’t fully exploit in order to tell more detailed stories in our survey reports. But balancing quantitative and qualitative methods is very difficult, as I’ve mentioned before, because the power punch of good narrative blows away the quiet power of high quality, representative statistical analysis. Reporting qualitative findings has to be done very carefully.

Over the summer I had the wonderful opportunity to apply my sociolinguistics education to a medical setting. Last May, while my mom was on life support, we were touched by a medical error when my mom was mistakenly declared brain dead. Because she was an organ donor, her life support was not withdrawn before the error was recognized. But the fallout from the error was tremendous. The problem arose because two of her doctors were consulting by phone about their patients, and each thought they were talking about a different patient. In collaboration with one of the doctors involved, I’ve learned a great amount about medical errors and looked at the role of linguistics in bringing awareness to potential errors of miscommunication in conversation. This project was different from other research I’ve done, because it did not involve conducting new research, but rather rereading foundational research and focusing on conversational structure.

In this case, my recommendations were for an awareness of existing conversational structures, rather than an imposition of a new order or procedure. My recommendations, developed in conjunction with Dr Heidi Hamilton, the chair of our linguistics department and medical communication expert, were to be aware of conversational transition points, to focus on the patient identifiers used, and to avoid reaching back or ahead to other patients while discussing a single patient. Each patient discussion must be treated as a separate conversation. Conversation is one of the largest sources of medical error and must be approached carefully is critically important. My mom’s doctor and I hope to make a Grand Rounds presentation out of this effort.

On a personal level, this summer has been one of great transitions. I like to joke that the next time my mom passes away I’ll be better equipped to handle it all. I have learned quite a bit about real estate and estate law and estate sales and more. And about grieving, of course. Having just cleaned through my mom’s house last week, I am beginning this new school year more physically, mentally and emotionally tired than I have ever felt. A close friend of mine has recently finished an extended series of chemo and radiation, and she told me that she is reveling in her strength as it returns. I am also reveling in my own strength, as it returns. I may not be ready for the semester or the new school year, but I am ready for the first day of class tomorrow. And I’m hopeful. For the semester, for the research ahead, for my family, and for myself. I’m grateful for the guidance of my newest guardian angel and the inspiration of great research.

A snapshot from a lunchtime walk

In the words of Sri Aurobindo, “By your stumbling the world is perfected”

Could our attitude toward marketing determine our field’s future?

In our office, we call it the “cocktail party question:” What do you do for a living? For those of us who work in the area of survey research, this can be a particularly difficult question to answer. Not only do people rarely know much about our work, but they rarely have a great deal of interest in it. I like to think of myself as a survey methodologist, but it is easier in social situations to discuss the focus of my research than my passion for methodology. I work at the American Institute of Physics, so I describe my work as “studying people who study physics.” Usually this description is greeted with an uncomfortable laugh, and the conversation progresses elsewhere. Score!

But the wider lack of understanding of survey research can have larger implications than simply awkward social situations. It can also cause tension with clients who don’t understand our work, our process, or where and how we add expertise to the process. Toward this end, I once wrote a guide for working with clients that separated out each stage in the survey process and detailed what expertise the researcher brings to the stage and what expertise we need from the client. I hoped that it would be a way of both separating and affirming the roles of client and researcher and advertising our firm and our field. I have not ye had the opportunity to use this piece, because of the nature of my current projects, but I’d be happy to share it with anyone who is interested in using or adapting it.

I think about that piece often as I see more talk about big data and social media analysis. Data seems to be everywhere and free, and I wonder what affect this buzz will have on a body of research consumers who might not have respected the role of the researchers from the get-go. We worried when Survey Monkey and other automated survey tools came along, but the current bevvy of tools and attitudes could have an exponentially larger impact on our practice.

Survey researchers often thumb their nose at advertising, despite the heavy methodological overlap. Oftentimes there is a knee-jerk reaction against marketing speak. Not only do survey methodologists often thumb their/our noses at the goal and importance of advertising, but they/we often thumb their/our nose at what appears to be evidence of less rigorous methodology. This has led us to a ridiculous point where data and analyses have evolved quickly with the demand and heavy use of advertising and market researchers and evolved strikingly little in more traditional survey areas, like polling and educational research. Much of the rhetoric about social media analysis, text analysis, social network analysis and big data is directed at the marketing and advertising crowd. Translating it to a wider research context and communicating it to a field that is often not eager to adapt to it can be difficult. And yet the exchange of ideas between the sister fields has never been more crucial to our mutual survival and relevance.

One of the goals of this blog has been to approach the changing landscape of research from a methodologically sound, interdisciplinary perspective that doesn’t suffer from the artificial walls and divisions. As I’ve worked on the blog, my own research methodology has evolved considerably. I’m relying more heavily on mixed methods and trying to use and integrate different tools into my work. I’ve learned quite a bit from researchers with a wide variety of backgrounds, and I often feel like I’m belted into a car with the windows down, hurtling down the highways of progress at top speed and trying to control the airflow. And then I often glimpse other survey researchers out the window, driving slowly, sensibly along the access road alongside the highway. I wonder if my mentors feel the change of landscape as viscerally as I do. I wonder how to carry forward the anchors and quality controls that led to such high quality research in the survey realm. I wonder about the future. And the present. About who’s driving, and who in what car is talking to who? Using what gps?

Mostly I wonder: could our negative attitude toward advertising and market research drive us right into obscurity? Are we too quick to misjudge the magnitude of the changes afoot?

 

This post is meant to be provocative, and I hope it inspires some good conversation.

Rethinking demographics in research

I read a blog post on the LoveStats blog today that referred to one of the most widely regarded critiques of social media research: the lack of demographic information.

In traditional survey research, demographic information is a critically important piece of the analysis. We often ask questions like “Yes 50% of the respondents said they had encountered gender harassment, but what is the breakdown by gender?” The prospect of not having this demographic information is a large enough game changer to cast the field of social media research into the shade.

Here I’d like to take a sidestep and borrow a debate from linguistics. In the linguistic subfield of conversation analysis, there are two main streams of thought about analysis. One believes in gathering as much outside data as possible, often through ethnographic research, to inform a detailed understanding of the conversation. The second stream is rooted in the purity of the data. This stream emphasizes our dynamic construction of identity over the stability of identity. The underlying foundation of this stream is that we continually construct and reconstruct the most important and relevant elements of our identity in the process of our interaction. Take, for example, a study of an interaction between a doctor and a patient. The first school would bring into the analysis a body of knowledge about interactions between doctors and patients. The second would believe that this body of knowledge is potentially irrelevant or even corrupting to the analysis, and if the relationship is in fact relevant it will be constructed within the excerpt of study. This begs the question: are all interactions between doctors and patients primarily doctor patient interactions? We could address this further through the concept of framing and embedded frames (a la Goffman), but we won’t do that right now.

Instead, I’ll ask another question:
If we are studying gender discrimination, is it necessary to have a variable for gender within our datasouce?

My kneejerk reaction to this question, because of my quantitative background, is yes. But looking deeper: is gender always relevant? This does strongly depend on the datasource, so let’s assume for this example that the stimulus was a question on a survey that was not directly about discrimination, but rather more general (e.g. “Additional Comments:”).

What if we took that second CA approach, the purist approach, and say that where gender is applicable to the response it will be constructed within that response. The question now becomes ‘how is gender constructed within a response?’ This is a beautiful and interesting question for a linguist, and it may be a question that much better fits the underlying data and provides deeper insight into the data. It also turns the age old analytic strategy on its head. Now we can ask whether a priori assumptions that the demographics could or do matter are just rote research or truly the productive and informative measures that we’ve built them up to be?

I believe that this is a key difference between analysis types. In the qualitative analysis of open ended survey questions, it isn’t very meaningful to say x% of the respondents mentioned z, and y% of the respondents mentioned d, because a nonmention of z or d is not really meaningful. Instead we go deeper into the data to see what was said about d or z. So the goal is not prevalence, but description. On the other hand, prevalence is a hugely important aspect of quantitative analysis, as are other fun statistics which feed off of demographic variables.

The lesson in all of this is to think carefully about what is meaningful information that is relevant to your analysis and not to make assumptions across analytic strategies.

Do you ever think about interfaces? Because I do. All the time.

Did you ever see the movie Singles? It came out in the early 90s, shortly before the alternative scene really blew up and I dyed [part of] my hair blue and thought seriously about piercings. Singles was a part of the growth of the alternative movement. In the movie, there is a moment when one character says to another “Do you ever think about traffic? Because I do. All the time.” I spent quite a bit of time obsessing over that line, about what it meant, and, more deeply, what it signaled.

I still think about that line. As I drove toward the turnoff to my mom’s street during our 4th of July vacation, I saw what looked like the turn lane for her street, but it was actually an intersection- less left- turning split immediately preceding the real left turn lane for her street. It threw me off every time, and I kept remembering that romantic moment in Singles when the two characters were getting to know each other’s quirks, and the man was talking about traffic. And it was okay, even cool, to be quirky and think or talk about traffic, even during a romantic moment.

I don’t think about traffic often. But I am no less quirky. Lately, I tend to think about interfaces. Before my first brush with NLP (Natural Language Processing), I thought quite a bit about alternatives to e-mail. Since I discovered the world of text analytics, I have been thinking quite a bit about ways to integrate the knowledge across different fields about methods for text analysis and the needs of quantitative and qualitative researchers. I want to think outside of the sentiment box, because I believe that sentiment analysis does not fully address the underlying richness of textual data. I want to find a way to give researchers what they need, not what they think they want. Recently, my thinking on this topic has flipped. Instead of thinking from the data end, or the analytic possibilities end, or about what programs already exist and what they do, I have started to think about interfaces. This feels like a real epiphany. Once we think about the problem from an interface, or user experience perspective, we can better utilize existing technology and harness user expectations.

Have you read the new Imagine book about how creativity works? I believe that this strategy is the natural step after spending time zoning out on the web, thinking, or not thinking, about research. The more time you cruise, the better feel you develop for what works and what doesn’t, the more you learn what to expect. Interfaces are simply the masks we put on datasets of all sorts. The data could be the world wide web as a whole, results from a site or time period, a database of merchandise, or even a set of open ended survey responses. The goal is to streamline the searching interface and then make it available for use on any number of datasets. We use NLP every day when we search the internet, or shop. We understand it intuitively. Why don’t we extend that understanding to text analysis?

I find myself thinking about what this interface should look like and what I want this program to do.

Not traffic, not as romantic. But still quirky and all-encompassing.

Question Writing is an Art

As a survey researcher, I like to participate in surveys with enough regularity to keep current on any trends in methodology. As a web designer, an aspect of successful design is a seamlessness with the visitor’s expectations. So if the survey design realm has moved toward submit buttons on the upper right hand corner of individual pages, your idea (no matter how clever) to put a submit button on the upper left can result in a disconnect on the part of the user that will effect their behavior on the page. In fact, the survey design world has evolved quite a bit in the last few years, and it is easy to design something that reflects poorly on the quality of your research endeavor. But these design concerns are less of an issue than they have been, because most researchers are using templates.

Yet there is still value in keeping current.

And sometimes we encounter questions that lend themselves to an explanation of the importance of question writing. These questions are a gift for a field that is so difficult to describe in terms of knowledge and skills!

Here is a question I encountered today (I won’t reveal the source):

How often do you purchase potato chips when you eat out at any quick service and fast food restaurants?

2x a week or more
1x a week
1x every 2-3 weeks
1x a month
1x every 2-3 months
Less than 1x every 3 months
Never

This is a prime example of a double barreled question, and it is also an especially difficult question to answer. In my care, I rarely eat at quick service restaurants, especially sandwich places, like this one, that offer potato chips. When I do eat at them, I am tempted to order chips. About half the time I will give in to the temptation with a bag of sunchips, which I’m pretty sure are not made of potato.

In bigger firms that have more time to work through, this information would come out in the process of a cognitive interview or think aloud during the pretesting phase. Many firms, however, have staunchly resisted these important steps in the surveying process, because of their time and expense. It is important to note that the time and expense involved with trying to make usable answers out of poorly written questions can be immense.

I have spent some time thinking about alternatives to cognitive testing, because I have some close experience with places that do not use this method. I suspect that this is a good place for text analytics, because of the power of reaching people quickly and potentially cheaply (depending on your embedded TA processes). Although oftentimes we are nervous about web analytics because of their representativeness, the bar for representativeness is significantly lower in the pretesting stage than in the analysis phase.

But, no matter what pretesting model you choose, it is important to look closely at the questions that you are asking. Are you asking a single question, or would these questions be better separated out into a series?

How often do you eat at quick service sandwich restaurants?

When you eat at quick service restaurants, do you order [potato] chips?

What kind of [potato] chips do you order?

The lesson of all of this is that question writing is important, and the questions we write in surveys will determine the kind of survey responses we receive and the usability of our answers.

To go big, first think small

We use language all of the time. Because of this, we are all experts in language use. As native speakers of a language, we are experts in the intricacies of that language.

Why, then, do people study linguistics? Aren’t we all linguists?

Absolutely not.

We are experts in *using* language, but we are not experts in the methods we employ. Believe it or not, much of the process of speaking and hearing is not conscious. If it was, we would be sensorally overwhelmed with the sheer volume of words around us. Instead, listening comprehension involves a process of merging what we expect to hear with what we gauge to be the most important elements of what we do hear. The process of speaking involves merging our estimates of what the people we communicate with know and expect to hear with our understanding of the social expectations surrounding our words and our relationships and distilling these sources into a workable expression. The hearer will reconstruct elements of this process using cues that are sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

We often think of language as simple and mechanistic, but it is not simple at all. As conversational analysts, our job is to study conversation that we have access to in an attempt to reconstruct the elements that constituted the interaction. Even small chunks of conversation encode quite a bit of information.

The process of conversation analysis is very much contrary to our sense of language as regular language users. This makes the process of explaining our research to people outside our field difficult. It is difficult to justify the research, and it is difficult to explain why such small pieces of data can be so useful, when most other fields of research rely on greater volumes of data.

In fact, a greater volume of data can be more harmful than helpful in conversation analysis. Conversation is heavily dependent on its context; on the people conversing, their relationship, their expectations, their experiences that day, the things on their mind, what they expect from each other and the situation, their understanding of language and expectations, and more. The same sentence can have greatly different meanings once those factors are taken into account.

At a time when there is so much talk of the glory of big data, it is especially important to keep in mind the contributions of small data. These contributions are the ones that jeopardize the utility and promise of big data, and if these contributions can be captured in creative ways, they will be the true promise of the field.

Not what language users expect to see, but rather what we use every day, more or less consciously.

Data Journalism, like photography, “involves selection, filtering, framing, composition and emphasis”

Beautiful:

“Creating a good piece of data journalism or a good data-driven app is often more like an art than a science. Like photography, it involves selection, filtering, framing, composition and emphasis. It involves making sources sing and pursuing truth – and truth often doesn’t come easily. ” -Jonathan Gray

Whole article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/may/31/data-journalism-focused-critical

Truly, at a time when the buzz about big data is at such a peak, it is nice to hear a voice of reason and temper! Folks: big data will not do all that it is talked up to do. It will, in fact, do something surprising and different. And that something will come from the interdisciplinary thought leaders in fields like natural language processing and linguistics. That *something,* not the data itself, will be the new oil.

Janet Harkness- the passing of a great mind in survey research

I just received this announcement from WAPOR. This is sad news. I attended an AAPOR short course that she helped to teach in the Spring of 2010, and she was very sharp, insightful and kind. At the time I was researching multilingual, multinational and multicultural surveys, and her writing was one of my mainstays.

“Janet Harkness died on Memorial Day (May 28, 2012) in Germany at age 63.  Harkness was the Director of the Survey Research and Methodology graduate program and Gallup Research Center, and holder of the Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Survey Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She was the founder and Chair of the Organizing Committee on the International Workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI).  Her many contributions to cross-national and cross-cultural survey research included service as Head of the International Social Survey Programme’s Methodology Committee (1997-2008),  board member of the National Science Foundation’s (USA) Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Advisory Board (2008-present),  board member of the  Deutsches Jugendinstitut (Germany) Advisory Board (2009-present), Co-initiator of the Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines Initiative, Chair of the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational and Multiregional Contexts (3MC, Berlin 2008), and member of the European Social Survey’s (ESS) Central Coordinating Team. The ESS was awarded the European Union’s top annual science award, the Descartes Prize, in 2005.  She has been a member of WAPOR since 2009.

Besides her substantial contributions and organizational achievements in cross-national survey research, Harkness made major contributions to the scholarly literature including Cross-Cultural Survey Equivalence (1998), Cross-Cultural Survey Methods (with F.J.R. Van de Vijver and P. Ph. Mohler, 2003), and Survey Methods in Multicultural, Multinational, and Multiregional Contexts (with M. Braun, B. Edwards, T.P. Johnson, L.F Lyberg, P. PH. Mohler, B. Pennell and T.W. Smith, 2010).

As her professional colleague, Don Dillman, Regents Professor at Washington State Unversity, noted of Janet “I don’t know of anyone who has done as much thinking as she has about cross-cultural surveys, and how measurement differs across languages and countries…That’s one of the major challenges we now face in doing surveys as we increasingly shift to a world-wide emphasis in survey design.”

She is survived by her husband Peter Ph. Mohler.”

——-

10/15/12 Edited to add some great news:

Announcement for the Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award

The Janet A. Harkness Student Paper Award will be issued annually, starting in 2013, by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to honor the memory of Dr. Harkness and the inspiration she brought to her students and colleagues.

In particular, WAPOR and AAPOR will consider papers related to the study of multi-national/ multi-cultural/multi-lingual survey research (aka 3M survey research), or to the theory and methods of 3M survey research, including statistics and statistical techniques used in such research. Paper topics might include: (a) methodological issues in 3M surveys; (b) public opinion in 3M settings; (c) theoretical issues in the formation, quality, or change in 3M public opinion; (d) or substantive findings about 3M public opinion. The competition committee encourages submissions that deal with the topics of the annual conferences, for which the call for papers are posted on both associations’ websites in the fall.

Submissions to the Harkness award competition are anticipated to be 15-25 pages in length. A prize of $750 will be awarded to the winning paper and the author(s) of the paper will be invited to deliver it as a part of either the annual WAPOR conference, AAPOR conference, or in certain years the WAPOR-AAPOR joint conference.

For a winning paper with one author, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay for the author’s travel expenses to and from the nearest WAPOR or AAPOR annual conference for that year. However, for a winning submission with multiple authors, WAPOR and AAPOR will pay only for the primary author (or his/her designee, who must be a co-author) to present the paper. Up to two other papers each year may receive an Honorable Mention designation with each receiving a $100 cash prize (though no travel expenses).

All authors must be current students (graduate or undergraduate) at the time of the submission, or must have received their degree during the preceding calendar year. The research must have been substantially completed while the author was (all authors were) enrolled in a degree program. Preference will be given to papers based on research not presented elsewhere.

A panel of public opinion researchers from WAPOR and AAPOR’s membership – drawn from academic, government, and commercial sectors – will judge the papers.

The 2013 Call-for-Submission of papers for the Harkness Award will be issued in the near future.

OT: On Loss and Grief and the power of Storytelling

On May 5, 2012 my mom passed away.
This is a professional and academic blog, and I have no intention of making it a personal one. But I believe that grieving is a universal enough aspect of our human experience that it couldn’t hurt to share our story.

The first question people tend to ask is whether she was sick. The answer to this question scratches the surface of what made her a particularly inspirational woman. She was sick- she had Multiple Sclerosis, but she believed firmly in never letting sickness get her down. In fact, MS never DID get her down. Her life with MS was smiling and full.

When I was a kid, some mornings I would approach my mom and ask to stay home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. She would listen while I listed my symptoms, and then she would list her own. Then we would shrug them off and go about our day. As an adult, I haggled with my mom seemingly endlessly for her ambitious plans for our days together. I would try to convince her that taking her grandkids (my kids) to the zoo was activity enough for a healthy person, and no one in their right minds would plan more than that.

In April, 2012, my mom went on a cruise with her sister. When she returned from the cruise, she was having quite a bit of difficulty breathing. She had developed a particularly nasty pneumonia. But she repeatedly shrugged off my pleas for her to go to the hospital. When she was finally rushed to the hospital, she told the medical staff off for running too many tests on her, checked out, and went to play Bridge. Despite her worsening pneumonia, she stayed active for 2 more days before calling 911. When the paramedics arrived, she didn’t answer her door. They broke her window to get in and managed to resuscitate her.

While they repeatedly used the paddles on her, I was at a Vegetarian Festival, laughing about funny vegetarian stickers and sharing a plate of veggie ribs with my kids. I received a call from a police officer saying that my mom had been found unresponsive, and I needed to get to the hospital ASAP. We flew out a few hours later (the drive would have taken about 14 hours), and once I arrived at the hospital I got a quick crash course in what it meant to be the only child of a single woman. As the nurse worked the manual resuscitating bag (because my mom was not stable enough on the life support machines), she told me that I held the de Facto Medical Power of Attorney and could ask her to stop the bagging at any time. The nurse worked the manual bag while I sobbed and reminisced and played Motown music for hours, and then my mom stabilized (relatively).

At this point, my mom had suffered severe Anoxia, almost to the point of brain death, in the time before the paramedics were able to resuscitate her. She was in Acute Respiratory Distress, or ARDS, and had not been able to breathe for herself since her resuscitation. Her heart had suffered in the time it had been stopped, and her lungs were stiff from contaminated fluid. Over the course of the week, the only response she gave was an infrequent pupil dilation in response to light shown in her eyes.

The life support situation was complicated by my mom’s attitude toward sickness. In fact, my mom had fought her way back from a coma, against all odds, before. In 1999, she had emergency open heart surgery for a dissected aorta. She defied the odds by surviving until the surgery, and then again for surviving the surgery, again for surviving the post surgery coma and a a stroke, and then again by recovering to live independently afterward.

But this (2012) coma persisted. She never woke up. She continued to have bouts of stability and instability. She was bleeding from her lungs and stomach. I cried over her and talked to her and had long talks with her friends. On the 3rd day, my kids flew back to their dad.

On the 6th day, things finally came together. I spoke to the paramedic who had answered her 911 call and discovered that she had taken her last breath on the phone with them, at least 10 minutes before she was resuscitated. My husband found her medical power of attorney forms, which had a ‘no heroic measures’ clause and gave me the power to withdraw her feeding tube. And we found out why she had left the hospital the previous week and refused to call 911 afterward.

After my mom’s health ordeal in 1999, she was told that she had a second aneurysm, and her remaining life would be limited. She was told that the 2nd aneurysm was inoperable. She often referred to her life as a “ticking time bomb.” I had learned not to hear this talk, as children do. But she had repeated it hundreds of times. It turned out that after over a decade of stability, this aneurysm had started to dissect in 2012. Instead of telling anyone about this, she booked the cruise and devised a bucket list.

That day in the hospital, I learned that she had discussed her bucket list with a few close friends, and she had discussed her wishes regarding life support with other close friends. I put the pieces together and saw that she had expected to die from the pneumonia, and she had put as much of her affairs in order as she could.

It was under the weight and disbelief of this realization that one of her favorite friends, a former political reporter, came to visit the hospital. We had a really wonderful conversation. It was cool to be able to merge my childhood memories of making poll calls on TV on election nights with his cool underlying sampling methodologies. I imagine that if my mom, who had been very active in politics, had been able to chose a conversation to hear while bedbound in a coma, that would have been the conversation.

That night, she had periods of instability, and the next morning she was more unstable. Her lips had started to bleed around the tube. She still hadn’t woken up or breathed on her own. It was too dangerous for her to get a scheduled EEG, and it was too dangerous for her to be turned or cleaned. I decided that I couldn’t let her suffer like this anymore. I met with every doctor, nurse, clergy and social worker who would talk to me. One of the nurses had repeatedly told me that I wouldn’t have to make any end of life decisions, because I could just listen to her body. She agreed with me that mom’s body was loudly and clearly saying it was time. We removed all of her tubes except for the breathing tube. I had no doubt that this was the right decision, but it was still an emotional one.

At this point, we started to call as many friends and family members as we could, allowing them to say goodbye. But we couldn’t reach her grandkids (my kids). Some of her friends in the room noticed three white doves outside the window. I was overwhelmed with a wave of exhaustion and put my head down on my mom’s arm, where I was flooded with memories of our life together. When I put my head up, I felt absolutely peaceful. At this point, we reached the grandkids, who each said goodbye. Then they sang a song for her (Katy Perry’s Firework- one of their favorites). I put them on speakerphone, and everyone in the room was crying. When they hung up, I asked everyone to say their goodbyes and leave my mom and I alone. Once they had left, the nurse removed mom’s breathing tube. She never breathed. Over the next few minutes, I held onto her and cried and told her that I loved her, that I would miss her, and that I forgave her. Then I told her that she deserved all of the riches of heaven, and that if she saw a light, she should go to it and know that she deserved it. As I said that, the most peaceful expression washed over her face, and her heart stopped beating under my hand. She was gone, and I felt absolutely peaceful, even a little joyful. After a week of crying and talking and carrying on, of all of the suffering we had been through, she had found such a peaceful and happy death. I knew without question that she was free.

Now, a couple of weeks later, I am in another phase of adjustment. We cleaned her house and put it up on the market. We organized all of her paperwork and began to work with the court. We had a beautiful funeral for her in her state and a wonderful remembrance for her in ours. And I’m left trying to fathom our new lives.

I am struck by the transformative power of events. Some transformations have names: woman to mother, fiance to bride, fetus to baby, student to graduate. But there is no name for the transformations that grieving brings about.

I found a reference that put a lot of my thoughts about this into words:
http://www.cappe.org/ed_mod/iii.%20Loss%20&%20Grieving%5B1%5D.pdf

Here are some highlights. I didn’t rewrite them. They aren’t mine to rewrite:

“The grieving process is to experience the pain of the loss while accommodating to a changed world and struggling to regain some degree of equilibrium.

Beyond the immediate urgency of surviving the traumatic impact of loss of life is the task to incorporate the death in the family story. At this point the focus is not so much on feelings than on thoughts through reconstruction and relearning one’s place in a changed world.

o  reconstruction and continuity
…“the end point of successful grief work is not relinquishment of the lost relationship but the creation of a new bond, one that acknowledges the enduring psychological and spiritual reality of someone we have loved and made a part of ourselves” (1994, 41,42).

o  The grieving person is not a passive recipient but rather an active agent in organizing and interpreting the meanings of his or her experience of loss and separation.

Grief follows a developmental, systemic process rather a linear progression of successive stages.

Grieving requires active personal engagement rather than submission to a predetermined healing process.

The goal of grieving is towards incorporating rather than recovering from the loss.”

What is striking to me about this resource, and about my experience, is the transformative, healing power of narrative. Putting a cohesive story around these events empowers my mom, empowers me to trust her, assures me that I made the correct and inevitable decisions, and gives me the confidence that she and I and our family will be able to rewrite these pieces into a cohesive, albeit different, future.

I sincerely hope that sharing my experience is as healing for you as it is for me. I edited out some of the parts that are most relevant to this blog in order to open it up to a different audience. I will probably discuss some of these parts in further blog posts if I’m able to move forward with them.

Thank you for reading.

Remotely following AAPOR conference #aapor

The AAPOR 2012 conference began today in sunny Orlando, Florida. This is my my favorite conference of the year, and I am sorry to miss it. Fortunately, the Twitter action is bringing a lot of the action to homeviewers like us!

https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23AAPOR

I will keep retweeting some of the action. For those of you who may be concerned that this represents a new era of heavy tweeting for me, rest assured- it wont!

And for anyone who has been wondering what happened to me and my blog, please stay tuned. I am working on an exciting new project that I will eagerly share about in due time.