Writing Club Meeting 8

Progress of group members

·         Nara has found an example of a paper that he wrote in his past when he worked for an NGO. He describes his writing style as “dry”. We’ll take a look at this in a future meeting and try to liven it up.

·         Anne has become an Ajarn since our last meeting (congratulations!) She’s now writing a report in English and working on the Centenarian website.

·         Reena attended the regional M&E workshop and has been working on a proposal on cross-border marriage.

·         Jongjit’s paper that we discussed earlier has been accepted at the ACS 2012 conference in Pattaya (congratulations). She will have a progress report presentation of her dissertation on Sept. 14.

·         Suwanya participated in the meeting via skype but did not have a microphone, so we couldn’t hear her. Hope that she can get one by next time.

·         Kerry is working on the special issue of JPSS, she has edited six articles and now has two articles plus the forward to write.

Guest speaker: Aj. Aphichat on “Targeting Journals for Publication”

Aj. Aphichat discussed several considerations for selecting a journal for your research papers:

•       Impact factor: Usually you should aim as high as possible, at least 1.0.

•       On-line and fee: Some journals (such as the online journals) charge as much as $1500. IPSR can help you with these fees if your article is accepted.

•       Journal interest & specialization: Consider the type of articles that a journal publishes, for example how much theory is usually included? Does the journal encourage qualitative work, or not?

•       Journal styles and convenience: Will you have to do a lot of work to have your article conform to the journal format—for example, the references?

•       Your area or your logo career: How do you want to be labeled—as a sociologist? Demographer? Someone who does research on public health?

•       Concentrated: You might want to publish within a narrow range of journals to establish yourself in a field: for example, in demography, in AIDS research, etc.

•       Diversified: You might want to make sure that you publish widely, in different fields. You might be a “duck”: can swim a little, fly a little, walk a little.

•       Romance: You may dream of publishing in a certain journal and aspire to that.

•     Aim high: Don’t be afraid to submit to a very good journal. You will get useful reviews, even if the paper is rejected; you can then improve the article and scale down. The lesser journals may give you a “nonsense” review that is not useful to you.

Aj. Aphichat then told us the history of an article he’s been trying to publish for some time:

The talk was extremely useful for us to think through how to choose a journal, and to remind us to be persistent!

Writing Club Meeting 6

We had a small but interesting meeting this time. Nara joined and mentioned that he would like some help in making his writing less dry. He will bring some examples to a future meeting. Both Cartoon and Jongjit submitted abstracts to the blog and we had time to discuss Cartoon's. 

I shared some resources from the internet that I have found. First, here is an academic writing club that you can join, for $70 per month:

http://academicwritingclub.com/

It has many of the same functions as our club, but allows you to log how many minutes you spend writing and to chat with others about problems with writing. You also receive personal coaching.

I have found this site on procrastination interesting:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay

As you procrastinate by reading through the site, you can find many many explanations for why you do so.

Finally, here are some good resources for specific questions on grammar and writing:

http://www.grammarbook.com/

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/

Next time Aj. Aphichat will talk about how to target journals to publish your articles.

Gap of Knowledge

This study focus on morthers' work related to infant morbidity and mortality in Thailand. In the modern world  change the informal working mother in agriculturer to be formal worker in industrial and service sectors, this will effect the difference health status of infant. the debate between absent from motherhood(breastfeeding) and working for income to provide more health service and living standard of family which one is the stronger positive or negative effect on infant morbidity and mortality. This dataset is fruitful data in prospective cohort design especially for analyze cohort and longitudinal analysis to explore this relationship. It never explain in this topic. the causal relationship between mothers' work and infant morbidity and mortality was not well explain clearly. Difference location, difference culture and difference context of each area can also show difference infant morbidity and mortality. Therefore, this study would like to investigate this relationship )

(More update soon)

Please feel free to give comments and suggestion.... Please

Hypothetical Orders of Kin Preferences for Elderly’s Support in Thailand

This study explored the kin preferences of Thai elderly for five types of assistance and support including meal preparation, personal care, transportation, financial support, and mental support. The qualitative method of focus group discussion was conducted in seven villages geographically across Nang Rong district which is located in the northeastern Thailand. For each village, male and female elderly whose age 60 and over were interviewed separately. As a result of the discussion, kin preferences were ranked in the first four orders by gender of elderly and types of support. It was found that male and female elderly’s preferences were slightly different regarding gender tasks and the traditionally matrilocal norm. However, the closest kin were firstly considered. Siblings and neighbors played significant roles when their close kin were not available. These hypothetical orders of kin preferences should be taken into account in order to provide the elderly’s long term care efficiently and sentimentally.

Please kindly give comments and suggestions for this abstract. Thank you very much. 

Writing Club Meeting 5

At this meeting we had a guest speaker, Hannah Collins from The Language Center at the Faculty of Graduate Studies. She spoke to us about preparing the English abstract of your dissertation for the graduate school. Her presentation is here:

Preparing Your Abstract Presentation

Click on the link and then you can download it. Unfortunately I can't upload the file directly to the blog.

Next meeting will be Wednesday July 11 at 13:30. Please feel free to make suggestions on the agenda. I'll give more information on plans for the meeting in next week's reminder email.