“I have read an article and it changed my life”Pamuk would start with that sentence if he were me. I will not start with such powerful phrase because I am just “writing “not a “writer”, there is a huge difference between two of them,I believe.But I genuinely decided to work on this topic after reading a perspective article about one HIV (+) patient who has decided to stop their anti-retroviral therapy.The writer of that article was GP of that patient and the GP highlighted very important point in that article: as a doctor,even with just warm talking and friendly touching to the shoulder of patient,we can change our patients’ life. We can encourage our patients to continue with treatment. I was about to find a topic for my finishing thesis and I wanted to conduct a “social” research. After that article, I inspired from that GP and I said to my self “how was the attitudes of the healthcare workers in my hospital towards people living with HIV?”, “did we overcome our prejudice?”, “do we still stigmatize the HIV (+) patients?”…After such questions, I talked with my supervisor and we started that long journey. Unfortunately, starting was not easy because of rejections. We rejected 3 times by ethical approval committee. Reasons were the same “questions are harsh and stigmatizing”. We were shocked. How can we measure the peoples’ attitude without asking questions state stigmatization. So we needed to change some questions and we needed to restrict our participants with just doctors and nurses. Our plan was measuring attitudes of all staff in the hospital and compare their attitudes with other group but we could not. My heart was little bit broken but a research was not about the feelings, it was about the “data”.
Researches need to be analytic and scientific, to reduce bias they need to be far from their feelings. Feelings can effect the results if your are deeply connected with. Thats true but you need to ask your self “do I need to lose my feelings to become a good researcher?” Of course not. Despite of losing you need to connect and follow your feelings. Without loving the topic you are working on you cannot maintain discipline that you need to finish your work. I spend two years. Without the feelings in my heart I could not finish this job.
Long story short, journey started with just one article and ended with another article. I hope my work and my words also can inspire the other researches and they can make our dreams come true with broaden our work or just following their hearts.