My name is Emma and I’m a second year student studying English Language. Over the summer, I took part in the Collaborative Research Internship and interned for a project investigating how autistic and allistic (non-autistic) people communicate their emotional experiences. The project was a collaboration between the English language and linguistics department and the psychology department.
I applied for the internship because the project interested me and I was curious to gain an insight into how research is carried out. As an English language student, I was interested to see how people use language to express their emotional experiences and how this might vary between people with neurological differences.
In class, I learnt about how language can be a window into other people’s feelings and perspectives, so I really wanted to see how it’s used to describe something as personal as emotional experiences. The differences this might present in autistic people compared to allistic people interested me not just because of the neurological differences and what this might reveal about the relationship between language and the brain, but also because a large number of autistic people have problems describing emotions. So I was very curious to see how this might impact the results.
The role of me and my fellow intern Fionnuala was to read the pilot data and categorise the different ways participant’s communicated their feelings. This data consisted of written responses by participants describing their emotional experiences. We started by looking at previous studies and discussing with each other how we thought we should categorise the data. My favourite part was reading about how other people experience emotion, as it isn’t normally something you have access to in so much detail. We can’t say exactly what we were looking for as the study is still ongoing!
In the first meeting, we met the project leads and they introduced us to the application we would be using, called NVivo. The pilot data gave the researchers an idea of what they might find in the study and it helped them to figure out the best way to collect data by listening to feedback from the participants. I liked seeing how much the participant’s feedback was taken into consideration when designing the study. The project leads put a lot of thought into how to accommodate the participant’s needs without sacrificing the reliability of the methodology, beforehand I hadn’t considered how complicated this might be.
We attended virtual and in person meetings about the project where we presented what we found in the data. I would recommend the internship to anyone who is curious about how research is carried out or just wants to develop their analytical and presentation skills, it is such an excellent opportunity. I’m very excited to see what the outcomes of the project are when it is completed!
Emma Ferry, BA English Language