I know it's a hard slog but i still think it's worth doing it yourself as you become much more familiar with your data as you're doing it. I spent 100 hours doing transcribing and am about to embark on about the same amount again. The one thing that I did find useful was a foot pedal That sped me up from 4 hours transcribing per 1 hour of tape to 3 hours!

Thanks Lara!
I know that been first author is good so I am certainly not taking that for granted.
I think I am just a little dissolutioned with how academia works. There's an element of unfairness about it. But I guess you have to play the game.
Perhaps I'm not cut out for it though....

I'm a social science student. Even though the guidelines say there is a difference between providing academic support in the form of supervision and actively contributing towards a paper I have a feeling that they will all want to be listed. I have a large supervisory group.
Will it dilute the relevance of the paper on my CV if I am the first author followed by 4 others?

What is the norm for academic papers and authorship based on your PhD work? Do all your supervisors automatically have a right to authorship? Can you just work with one particular supervisor for a paper? Or would you always have to include everyone? My university regulations are a bit hazy so I wondered what other people's experiences had been??

That was meant to say agree not disagree!

Yep I totally disagree. I am currently writing up an assignment for my final module. This is right in the middle of my data collection and analysis.
It just seems like such a waste of time, having already spent a few solid days on it.
My aim is to get it finished today. It doens't matter what grade I get as you just need a pass to get the credits.

Not sure if this will be useful but you could try http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/Conference.htm for sociology conferences.