The PA Relationships study officially begins on 1 November 2015, and we welcome our researcher, Dr Tom Porter, who has come to us from a PhD at the University of Keele.
Tom's doctorate was a qualitative study with older people who experience multiple chronic illnesses, exploring their social networks and other community resources. Previously Tom studied History at University of Hull and Social Research at the University of Warwick. We are very excited to welcome Tom back to Norwich to begin work on this innovative and important project.
We have not been idle in preparing for Tom's arrival. Our application for research ethics clearance from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Research Ethics Committee has already been submitted, was discussed in October, and we hope that permission will be speedily negotiated.
During the first few months of the project, we will be ensuring we are up to date on background literature, and fine-tuning our methodology. We hope to begin data collection early in 2015.
In the coming months, we hope to update this blog with regular posts, explaining the detailed goals of the study, exploring the data collection approaches we are using, and discussing interesting research papers. We will also introduce members of the team, and the wonderful group of people who we are working with, both in the advisory group and in the disabled people's organisations who are helping us recruit participants to the study.
