Researching Nomadic Lifestyle: Participate in my study!

April 26, 2015 August 8, 2015

Not only did we both quit our jobs to travel the world. I’ve also put my dissertation on hold. While traveling, I got inspiration to change my topic and start fresh. We easily met a lot of wonderful people who were traveling just like us, many of whom have been able to work full-time. With my background in Industrial-Organizational psychology, I became interested in the working life of these full-time travelers. When I came back from the trip, I dove deep into telecommuting research but what I found is very little information on full-time telecommuters who do all work on-line and are not in the same location as their co-workers, clients and bosses. After all that research, a few questions lingered in my head: How do people transform their life into a location independent travel lifestyle? How do location independent workers think about work and its influence on their sense of self? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this lifestyle? How has this major lifestyle change impacted their perception of self and the world?

Now I am able to influence literature and research with my own findings to shed light on this unique population of extreme telecommuters. That’s exactly how I titled my dissertation: Extreme Telecommuting: job attitudes, behaviors and values of location independent workers. Now, I need your help, nomads!

Are you a long-term traveler who sustains travel by working remotely? If you answered yes, I’d like to invite you to participate in my research study.

As a doctoral candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, I’d like to ask for your participation in my dissertation study that seeks to understand and explore the experience of workers who have chosen to travel full-time to destinations of their choice. Little research has been done understanding this experience of redesigning one’s life in order to have the freedom for long-term, international travel. I am particularly interested in the vocational aspect of this lifestyle.

You will be asked to voluntarily agree to participate in this study, followed by general demographic inquiries.

Here is the qualification criteria to participate in this study:
•Citizen of a stable, industrialized country who choose travel while working as a lifestyle
•Has traveled internationally while working for at least 1 year during the last 5 years
•The location of the travel destinations is or was completely under their control
•Has visited and worked from more than one country during the travel experience
Work:
•Full or part-time employees of a company or full or part-time independent contractors
•Is or were able to conduct work outside of a conventional work location (teleworking) while traveling

Each individual participant will be asked to complete a quick qualifying survey, a questionnaire on-line via www.surveymonkey.com and to take part in one 60 minute audio-recorded interview via Fuze, which is a reliable conference call system.

The total time commitment for participants will not exceed 1 hour and 30 minutes.

If you are interested, please comment on this blog post and I will contact you right away. I would kindly appreciate your time and help in expanding this area of telecommuting research in order to help other individuals fulfill their dream of long-term travel without ending their working life.

THANK YOU!!!!

Yelena Ogan
PhD Candidate in Business Psychology
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

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