Yeah Kop it was a slight risk to start with becaue of the nature of the topic! But it was actually suggested to me by my tutor last year, on the back of researching Hillsborough for a couple of my assignments and doing well in them.
It's been rewarding to find out first-hand how the feelings of local people have developed and changed over the years and what they think the future might hold for police/gov/media etc.
Very glad I did take on this topic and have had the chance to meet a few Merseysiders!
Yeah don't get me wrong it's a great thing to write about but having written a disseration myself in sports psychology you need a lot of references, and if you're doing an original piece of work, you may find it hard. My dissertation looked at the relationship between growing up in a low income area/household and the subsequent affect of achieving sporting success coming from that kind of background. There are a lot of stuides regarding education and social class but there's not much around sport & social class. I was very very good at Tennis when I was young but my parents weren't well off, and when I got given free lessons at my local David Lloyd for winning tournaments, they basically laughed my out of the place without giving me (a 12 year old winning 16 year old level tournaments) a chance because I didn't have the right footwear.
I had/have a lot of friends who grew up in very poor areas, who were at academies, and it was focused around their experiences, and how their day to day life in a shithole area helped/hindered their ability to kick on in football. In most cases they failed, and it was a good study but there was pretty much nothing to compare it to, so when it came to analysis of the interviews, I was pretty much fucked. Some ended up in prison, some ended up getting kicked out for their behaviour. One still plays for Stockport County now, but he was at Wigan when I first interviewed him. Had they grown up in Cheshire with rich parents who focused their talent would they now be in the Premier League?
Had I done work on the relationship between music & endurance I'd have had 1,000 studies to compare with, and likely would have got a first. I wanted to do something original that meant somehting to me, and I got royally fucked for it. That's undergraduate degrees.