It’s hard to believe but all being well, from 1 February I’ll be a fourth year student. I’m hoping the PhD process will take around five years, so it’s well over halfway. I am now in the next stage of research. I plan to interview church leaders and interested parties over the next 9 months. The aim here is to understand what circumstances, opinions and attitudes are shaping the use, or not, of internet-based tools in many guises.

It’s probably a legacy of my first degree – Psychology, where I learned to calculate statistics on paper – that my inclination tends to be towards quantitative methods. Give me graphs, give me numbers, give me spreadsheets and I am happy. Therefore dealing with qualitative interview data is going to be a whole new learning experience. There will always be times when counting tick box answers is the most appropriate method of investigating a question. But it will miss subtle differences, and doesn’t allow the kind of ‘yes, but…’ answer that can be really illuminating. In particular, I want to talk to people with little or no experience of creating content online. So as long as I want real opinions, interviews are the way to go. This approach is also going to allow me the pleasure of meeting and talking with people I don’t know, and that is always an interesting part of life.