Foreign Perspectives

Having finished the preparatory steps, the project work began this morning.

From 9am to 10am was allocated to forming the groups and choosing topics. The only organisation imposed was that there was one room allocated for the people interested in a communications project and another for those interested in memory so it was a little chaotic to begin with but settled down surprisingly quickly and in 15 minutes or so most project groups had been formed.

That notionally left an hour to work up the initial project proposal though several groups needed an extension on that for one reason or another (e.g. our original idea was vetoed on ethical grounds and required a few adjustments to the approach). After that, we’d a break for an hour to let the tutors sort out which groups they were looking after before a brief meeting with them and then we were off for the day.

I figured that I couldn’t leave Bath without seeing the Roman baths so it was off to town for me. Upfront the £14.50 seems a bit expensive but it’s actually quite good value given the sheer scale of the place and considering that both an audio guide and a tour led by a very knowledgeable and engaging guide is included. It takes around two hours to work your way around.

It was the turn of memory today with three distinct modules followed by a session on ethics and the project briefing before an optional lecture.

The first module looked at different strategies for learning word pairs (forming a sentence containing both words is the way to go as it engages deeper processing which in turn helps encoding and recall). We analysed our results using ANOVA in SPSS.

Next up was a consideration of a variation of Bartlett’s demonstration of the usefulness of schemas in recalling meaningful material and events. Even just omitting a title from a text can make it much more difficult to recall. This session finished with a brief look at autobiographical memory which looks like it would be quite difficult to study.

Finally, we looked at Edwards and Middleton’s approach to looking at collective memory which felt like a complicated way of describing the obvious i.e. If a couple if people get together to describe a film then they’ll remember more than either would individually.

The obligatory session on ethics was much more engaging than I had expected to be and the time flew in.

With our preparatory sessions over it was into the project briefing. That ran through the eight basic areas in which we can choose to do our project i.e. one for each broad topic covered over Sunday and Monday. It seems to have served to confuse most people in terms of what they might do but it’ll sort itself out in the morning.

The optional lecture was on the use of psychology in lion conservation projects in Africa and was thoroughly engaging.

Thanks to massively reduced numbers on the final residentials compared to a few years ago, the students union don’t organise their customary social events so there are some unofficial ones in their place, tonight being karoke night.

This is the first of two days of preparation for the project that we’ll start on Tuesday.

For me, it was the day to look at various aspects of communication, split into three quite distinct modules.

The observational approach looked at a recording of a discussion on “talking proper” which we worked through with the aim of picking out appropriate psychological theories to explain how the group members interacted. As usual with the qualitative approaches, we finished with an attempt at a reflexive analysis of our analysis.

Next up was a quantitive approach to analysing a different discussion. This looked at several different countable features of the discussion from rating scales, to counting gestures to how long each person spoke via interval sampling and highlighted the difficulty in getting consistency between observers.

Finally, we looked at the use of Chi-Squared to do a content analysis on a series of texts and finished off with a thematic analysis of a couple of newspaper articles.

It felt very much a whistle-stop tour of techniques which is, of course, exactly what it was intended to be.

Outside the communications strands, we had a short introduction to the computer suite and how we might search for articles for our project.

Last, but not least, was a choice between a lecture on thematic analysis (compulsory for those who started the main course in February) and the optional one on interpretation of dreams.

The Saturday was quite restful for me as I flew over to Bristol yesterday though the lengthy trip on the A4 bus followed by the much shorter one on the 18 made it quite a trek. It was a leisurely start today with a late breakfast at the Limetree followed by several hours wandering round Bath (which wasn’t as crowded as I had expected).

Registration at 2pm left me several more spare hours before the introduction to the residential at 5.45. Next was tea before the first lecture from our tutor which was basically a refresher of several concepts from quantitative and qualitative research but which showed that we all really needed a refresher.

After that we’d just to collect our usernames and passwords before they finished off with a little ice-breaker party though most people has slipped away before that.

This is the first year that it’s become truly possible to take control of your own pension. Up to now, most people with money-purchase (or defined contribution) pensions had to hand over their money to an insurance company and buy an annuity with it. Thankfully, that practice is ended and we get to keep the cash.

What’s stopping a lot of people is simply lack of understanding of what a pension is. In fact, it’s really quite simple: it’s a savings account that you use to build up a sum of money that will eventually provide enough income to support you in your later life. Despite all the changes, it remains a limited access account. Once you put the money in, you can’t take it out again until you’re at least 55. However, when you put the money in, you get a tax rebate so that, for a basic rate tax payer, every £1000 you put in becomes £1250 in the pension. Anything that you withdraw from it is subject to income tax but with an allowance that means that the first 25% you take out is not taxed, whether you take this out as a single large lump sum (as historically people did) or as a series of smaller amounts (in which case 25% of each withdrawal is tax free).

If you’ve had a few jobs over the years, chances are that you’ll have a small pension account for each one. Small pension accounts are generally bad news as the charges, particularly on older accounts, can be rather high. If this sounds like you, it’s best to investigate the possibility of combining the various accounts which will reduce the charges and let you take control of your pension.

Are you up to taking control of it though? The sums involved in pensions can be quite substantial and the sheer size of the sums can put people off managing the money themselves. If you’re comfortable with the amount involved, there are a range of Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs) around that will let you do that but equally you can choose an investment manager to look after the account for you.

Either way, you need to establish what your objectives are and what your attitude to risk is as that will determine just how the pension account is invested.

As with everything in pensions, the timescale for transfers can be surprisingly long. To move a company pension to a private one (which will normally require you to take professional advice) can take four months or more but even a simple transfer is likely to take a month or two. Mind you, that does have the advantage that it gives you a lot of time to think about how the fund will be invested which is no bad thing.