PhD group meeting

Here are my current crop of PhD students. The photograph was taken just after we had our regular monthly meeting. This time with Danai talking about her – to be completed this year – PhD work. Danai has conducted three studies, two interviewing veterans and one interviewing their wives. The focus of the first study was to explore the utility of karting for veterans, most of whom are living with severe disabilities such as limb loss. The study showed that karting makes a big difference to many of the veterans, giving them an opportunity to compete fairly against able bodied people (the karts have adjustments which mean they can control them even when missing limbs), to enjoy the rush of adrenaline and to re-experience the comradeship they had in the forces (for more details see the Kartforce website) – and thanks to Kartforce for helping us with participants for this study.

Danai’s other main aim with the veterans was to explore the transition experiences of the veterans, the transition from civilian to military, and then from military to civilian, looking at the factors that helped or hindered these transitions. This is currently an important issue nationally.

Her final study looked at how wives cope with their veteran husbands (the sample did not include any female veterans). On the one hand they provide social support to veterans who might have problems, on the other they also have to learn to cope with being the wife of a veteran.

Danai is still analysing the data, so we cannot explore the findings in more detail at this stage, but the thesis should be completed sometime this summer.

Much of the thesis focuses on the narrative approach to interviewing and to analysis. Danai made use of our new technique, the Narrative Life Interview (NLI).