Monday, August 10, 2009

paul's got a thesis...

or at least a topic and a go-ahead. paul's had tons of ideas for his thesis project lately, and he's had a couple meetings with his advisor (george) where he's changed his mind, at least it seems that way to me, but i may be remembering wrong. anyways, this past friday he had a meeting where he and george were equally excited about an idea, so he's right on track to finish in five years still (as in 5 total, not 5 more :). he's working on determining how the attitude of the parents and their tone affects children more profoundly than the type of discipline. he'll need to come up with some sort of survey-type "experiment" and the results will need tons of statistical manipulation to determine significance, but it's a project that hasn't been looked into too much, so there's a lot of room to get results (or not, but that'd still be enough for a thesis).

george works a lot with parent-child relationships and discipline, and most of the literature out there is trying to determine effectiveness of different disipline styles (aka, is time-out more effective than spanking... etc), and there isn't much written about how the discipline is envoked (probably because it is a little harder to define)... anyways, we're just glad he ws able to come up with a topic, and its something that's interesting enough to paul to get him excited about doing the research. it should also help with his third year project (a comprehensive literature search--i can't remember exactly what it's officially called), so he will be working on that for a while, and hopes there will be an avenue that opens up to a dissertation topic eventually, though he's really not sure what yet. he's been really good about finding other problems and loop-holes, if you will, in other research he's been doing/reading, so i'm sure he'll be able to find somthing he's really intersted in for that.

yea pablo!

1 comment:

Elaine said...

Thats exciting that he found something that is exciting to him. That topic does sound interesting.