I started reading a dissertation from 2006 about 30 minutes ago, and began to realize that the hypotheses were very similar to mine. In fact, they were damned near identical. I almost pissed myself, thinking that I was looking at something that had already been done.
Long story short, I forced myself to read on and found that while he looked at the same thing, he used a different enough methodology that I'm still okay. He looked at word pairs and used cued recall. I'm using prose passages and free recall. I'm getting a drink. I thought I'd just found something that meant I had to scrap the last year of work and start over.
Maria (a friend at grad school) had a very apt metaphor. It's the academic version of a pregnancy scare. It's like my thesis skipped it's period and I was sitting there waiting to see if the test showed a plus or a minus.
Luckily, it showed me a minus this time. I need a drink.
Long story short, I forced myself to read on and found that while he looked at the same thing, he used a different enough methodology that I'm still okay. He looked at word pairs and used cued recall. I'm using prose passages and free recall. I'm getting a drink. I thought I'd just found something that meant I had to scrap the last year of work and start over.
Maria (a friend at grad school) had a very apt metaphor. It's the academic version of a pregnancy scare. It's like my thesis skipped it's period and I was sitting there waiting to see if the test showed a plus or a minus.
Luckily, it showed me a minus this time. I need a drink.
signalnoise:
There's nothing worse than thinking your project is already done. I hate hearing about people even working in the same *substantive* area, regardless of their theoretic interests. 