Doubting my abilities and capacity to take this forward....can I really dig deep into the data and come up with meaningful conclusions?  Finding it difficult to find the time to think and focus and then when I do to get my head into gear and think and concentrate........  Hmmm.........

Seminar booked for Monday 6 July at the RFMS.  Need to get my title and abstract submitted and then put together a presentation for the session.  The key aims of the seminar will be to test my theory of what the data is saying and get feedback from my audience.  Hopefully I will be asked pertinent questions and have any omissions highlighted.  Best to get asked the difficult questions now and have any errors and omissions pointed out now rather than at the viva!

Good supervision session today.  Really beginning to feel that I am putting a thesis together now.  Plan now is to revisit the Yellow Chapter and interrogate the data further and to summarise the chapter in my own words.  Supervisors suggestion is that I do that before pressing on further with the Turquoise Chapter.  The intention then is for me to compare and contrast my conclusions from the Yellow Chapter with Kleinman's 5 Parts of the Illness Experience which is the Turquoise Chapter.

Whilst reading Kleinman's book 'Pateints and Healers in the Context of Culture' in preparation for writing my Turquoise Chapeter, I came upon a series of concepts that I found both interesting and relevant to the PhD.  I have recorded them here as a way of being able to re-access them in the future:

~ Healthcare activities need to be studied holistically in the context that they are socially organised responses to disease
~ Medicine is a cultural system - a system of symbolic meanings anchored in particular arrangements of soical institutions and patterns of interpersonal interactions
~ In every culture, the responses to illness by the individuals experiencing it, those treating it and the social institutions relating to it are all systematically interconnected
~ The totality of the relationships is the healthcare system

Two key writers I need to visit/revisit are Zola (1972) and Illich (1975) who both write about the medicalisation of society.

Giddens (1976) also has something to say: the cultural analysis of any concrete aspect of the social world should attend to the effects produced by the interplay of 3 types of forces:

~ Meaning
~ Norms
~ Power

The power differential between the sick role and the therapeutic role is an ideal example of this.

Yellow Chapter first draft finished and now half way through Turquoise Chapter.......the colours really are meaningful at this stage of the write-up - needless to say they will not be the final chapter names......  The colours for chapters came about from an earlier mind map which identified what I needed to develop in the thesis and which bit linked to what etc.  Colours to follow are the Blue and the Red Chapters....