I'm meeting with Dr. Kim, my thesis advisor, tomorrow to discuss the change in my masters thesis topic. My graduate program is something that's called quantitative psychology, which is basically statistical analysis for behavioral sciences. It's not an exciting job, and no I can't psychoanalyze you, but I am good at it, and hopefully one day its going to make me a lot of money, far more than those Freud wannabe's. Not that not being a Freud wannabe deters anyone from confessing all their secrets and expecting me to solve all their problems. I guess that's the price I pay for being a people person in the psychology field. And is it really their fault that no one besides the 12 people in my program know exactly what quantitative psychology?
I digress. Anyway, so up until Thursday my thesis topic was an exploratory study on military wives infidelity during soldier's deployment. For obvious reasons I am interested in this topic. You should hear the stories that Tom tells me! He said he's one of the only ones he knows that isn't having relationship problems over there, and it's only been three months. How hard is it to not cheat on your husband? I just don't understand it! Which is exactly why I want to study it. Interestingly, when I started doing literature review to find previous studies on this I couldn't find a single thing. In fact, I couldn't even find a hard statistical figure for the military divorce rate. Which is weird, because this is obviously an issue and it needs to be looked into, like 7 years ago.
Apparently though, its not so weird. I guess the military doesn't want people to do any research that would put them in a bad light. Which is just find so ridiculous, because with research we can pinpoint problems and then help them. Trust me, I guarantee that if wives stopped cheating on their husbands morale over seas would boost ten-fold. But hey, what do I know? I'm just a lowly grad student. With that being said the chances of me getting permission to conduct this research is about .01%, which even not being a quant student you can tell is not very likely. And without permission from the military there's no way I could go any further without serious ramifications, and really my masters thesis is so NOT worth getting into trouble with the military, especially since I want to get a govt. job when I graduate.
It's still a shame, really. I know I could have been published. And I know I would have been able to really start progress on finding what is behind the desire to be unfaithful and start building up some sort of preventive programs.
I guess I'll just stick to making my own future marriage the best that it can be instead of taking on the weight of the whole militarys.
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