So this weekend I have been reading over a lot of Dr. Day's articles that he sent me about his project and its all kind of overwhelming. The scope of his study is huge. I don't think I can get anywhere near that in my field study. It also seems like it is going to be much harder than I expected to adapt it to a non U.S. culture. I guess I expected it to be different as far as the relationship between family and culture. I think there are plenty of universal aspects but I am not sure how I am going to narrow it down, or if i have the expertise needed to do so. I may have to just try and develop my own scale and study that is not reliant on Dr. Day's, but again a lack of expertise is going to get in the way. I may have to be more generic...just ask questions about how family and parents work and then code them to quantify their answers.
It's also becoming more and more clear that I need to stay away from LDS families when I do my study. As i talk to more Brazilians and ask about their families I keep finding Mormon American things about their customs and traditions. I don't know if it is because american family practices and such influence a lot of what general authorities teach and is then implemented by LDS families in Brazil or if it more because of the media and such, a great deal of which comes from the United States.
Anyway This is the stuff I have been thinking about as I read and debated with myself.
That is definitely a struggle at this point in the game. You keep finding great information but don't know how to use it, or if you can use it in your own study. I know I struggled with narrowing my topic because I still wasn't sure what the most relevant issues were. It just took a lot of time in the library researching the issues to figure out what I wanted to do.
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