Sounds like you two are both making great progress! And will probably need a good lie-down at the weekend, too....

Today, I need to catch up on the work I failed to do yesterday. So many of my days begin like this! I woke up in the night stressing about how much I need to do and how little I'm achieving, and then had bad dreams - I think this is at least partly because of my cold, but it's a warning sign that I'm getting stressed, so I need to take some breaths and plan my work properly.

So, goals for today:

1.) Look at colleague's online web survey to give her feedback and also get idea of software
2.) Prepare for supervision session
3.) Write up notes from supervision session
4.) Draw up a decent workplan for the next few weeks
5.) Make some progress on the journal article I'm supposed to be writing

If I achieve all of that I'll feel a lot happier about things.

Personally, I would always be honest about that - if you lie, you never know how it will come back and bite you (what if you lie and then get two offers, and have to then tell one that you did actually apply elsewhere? The academics you have to explain that to might end up being important in your future career!) I think they expect people to apply in more than one place anyway, particularly if you're chasing funding - the important thing is to show that you are actually very interested in and committed to their project or particular interest through the way you talk about the subject, rather than by demonstrating they're the only people you've applied to. (I would, however, always tell them they were my first choice, even if they weren't!!)

I applied for two PhDs at the same time, at different universities. I told both that I had applied to the other. The first interview was with a different university to the one I did my Masters degree at, and knew I had a reasonable chance of being offered funding to stay at the university where I did my Masters; the second interview was with my Masters university, and they knew I had already been offered a place at the other one subject to a funding bid being accepted. Both sets of academics seemed fine with that situation - they're realistic enough to understand that you can't put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I accepted the place at the university I didn't do my Masters at, but the person who offered me the PhD at my Master university is now collaborating with me on a journal paper, so it really did no harm at all!

Yay, congratulations! I hope you were away celebrating. Minor corrections is great - must be such a relief!

Yes, I think that is what I want.

Andy Field's example of reporting included things changing over time - so he's saying at first there's no difference between two groups (and reports the non-significant findings) then says that after x amount of time, there was a difference between the two groups (and reports the significant findings). Looking at it again now, I think I can see how my results would fit the way he's explained it - I think maybe lack of confidence with stats just caused me to think I was missing something. I think my results would be that for most of the things I'm measuring (different behaviours) there was no difference between the two groups (and I'd give those figures in a table) but in one behaviour there was a difference, and this difference was y.

Thanks, just thinking it through on here has really helped!

======= Date Modified 20 Jan 2011 16:38:03 =======
No, parametric is to do with whether it's normally distributed, isn't it? Ratio data isn't always normally distributed, so can be non-parametric. Ordinal data - well, isn't there disagreement about whether it can really be parametric at all? Anyway, either way, mine is non-parametric, even if you think that scales formed from ordinal data provide ratio results....

I think I know what I mean, even if nobody else does...!

Yes, the data is non-parametric (if you count this kind of scale data as ratio rather than ordinal). So maybe I am okay then. Reassurance is good so thanks for that! (Have a star...)

Not sure this reply will be too much help, Button - but you're not the only one to be confused by theoretical lenses! I couldn't work out how deep the theoretical basis for what I'm doing needed to go - how much theory there needed to be to justify the approach I was taking. But in the end I've decided it's not as bad as I feared - it varies according to how applied your research is, and how much theoretical work there tends to be in your discipline. My work is kind of cross-disciplinary, and that left me feeling I had to marry psychological, sociological, geographic and environmental theories together. Now I think I just need to explain the particular approach I'm taking and how that shapes the way my research is designed and the elements I'm focusing on.

As to the key concepts - I think those become familiar through the literature - it's the stuff that either keeps coming up over and over in different journal articles, or it's concepts that give a way of looking at the literature and seeing patterns or groupings within it so that it all seems much more coherent and less sprawling. That's how I see it, anyway.

Not sure that's a very helpful answer but I'm sure someone will be along with something more sensible to say!

Sounds like you're making good progress!

I've ground to a halt. I seem to have developed a block when it comes to writing this journal paper - I've been trying for months. I think I need to just try to blast it out and see what I can do once I have a crappy draft to work from. But not sure that today will be the day I manage this - my cold is getting worse and my whole head feels muffled up, so doing anything involving actual thought is a struggle!

Oh well. Maybe I'll leave that work until I'm feeling better and get on with something else instead.

Hi everyone

I hope someone can help me with this statistical analysis - I've been staring at it for so long now that I seem to have lost any ability to think this through, and have managed to completely confuse myself!

I'm trying to compare self-reported behaviour by two different groups of people (one group went through a pilot behaviour intervention programme, the other group didn't). The data is ordinal. I think I should be using a Mann-Whitney U test to identify any differences, and I've calculated the results of this, but when I look at the example in Andy Field's book of how to report the results, I can't see how this fits with the things I've been looking at. So now I'm wondering if this was the wrong test after all!

Does anyone have any helpful suggestions? Or am I just being a complete idiot driven blind by staring at SPSS for too long?

Thanks in advance!

Hah, Star-shaped, I quite often have thoughts like that when I wake up!

My cold is no better today but I have to keep pushing through. Not going to kill myself with work today though. Two goals - firstly, to write a detailed plan for the journal article I've been trying to write for months, and secondly, to look at the set-up of an online survey a colleague's developed to give her feedback and to get an idea about how the software works.

Yikes, deadlines! I guess mine is September 2012, as that's when my funding runs out... Seemed a long way away but now I'm thinking that's no time at all....

Pink_numbers - you take time off if you want time off! It's so easy to get burnt out, so breaks are good. And sounds like you've earned it!

Finished the work I wanted to do on my questionnaire. I can feel my temperature rising and my face burning up with this cold, but I want to get another couple of hours work done before I let myself finish the day early and slob out moaning about being ill! Time to go through scrawled notes on journal articles I skim-read a while back and write these up into proper notes, I think.

I agree with Florence, and what most other people have said, too. There's plenty of possible innocent explanations, and it would be a shame for your relationship to become strained or awkward if it's not anything untoward. I agree that the focus on practicality worked well - even if he was testing the water for some further kind of advance, this will have told him you're definitely not thinking along those lines, but I agree that it's probably all perfectly innocent (probably to do with him now being semi-retired, and forgetting where you live, I'd say). Having said that, I think it's understandable that you were unsure about this - I know if my supervisors suddenly invited me to their homes I'd feel really awkward about it!

Congratulations on getting it in! Hope you're having some time off to recover as well.

======= Date Modified 19 Jan 2011 11:45:41 =======
I hate it when people ask me what my PhD is about, because when I tell them a really simplified version they often seem to think I'm actually asking them the central question, and then try to answer it off the top of their head. So I get lots of anecdotes about the stuff I'm looking at, presented to me with a beaming smile of 'look, I've solved it for you!' Of course, so far none of them actually have solved it for me... save me a lot of work if they did! Sometimes I give a brief explanation of why it's not as simple as they seem to think; other times, I can't be bothered, and just smile and say their point is probably one part of it. Silly of me to get annoyed by that, really! It's just so repetitious!

Today, I woke up with a stinking cold, and am making hardly any progress. I want to add details of how I'm analysing each question to my questionnaire. Once I've done that, I'm going to do something easy because I'm feeling so rough - probably go through some notes on journal articles I read a while back, and reading a bit more.

Keep going Star-shaped, just think of the relief when it's done!

I have one more section of questions to refine, and then I need to go back and add in sources for most of the questions, which is just copying from an earlier draft really, and then I'll be done. These questions are a bugger though!