www.surveymonkey.com - I remembered! Also would be useful to distinguish between your two methods (i.e. the survey would be more 'scientific' while focus groups tend to produce more subjective data) and how they relate to each other- good luck!

You can theoretically get funding from the esrc for an MA in something like this (or a university scholarship maybe), but if you have already started the course then it would be a problem I think. A career development loan (no repayments for 12 months, during the course, then you have to repay at exorbitant interest for the next so many years) was a fairly good option for me, and might be suitable as well. Funding for MA's seems to be getting harder and harder to come by unfortunately, especially in political/international studies. Hope that helps.

Hello- I don't know if this will help or not, but its something I tried doing recently:
There are some opportunities for volunteering as an election observer, or with other missions undertaken by the OSCE in all sorts of different countries. Looks quite interesting, but also a little complex- you need to apply via the UK OSCE representative in Vienna, who will then send you info on the organisations which send volunteers on the UK's behalf and you then apply to them. But I think they are also looking for volunteers on other projects as well, so it might still be worth looking into even if observing elections isnt your thing...

Hello- agree with the above, think the way you approach it- with focus groups (qualitative) and surveys (quantitative)- would produce some interesting results. In terms of both, you would need to make sure that the people taking part are representative of 'students' as far as possible (so gender, class, age and so on), especially for the questionnaire section. I suppose that the other big problem would be getting people to take part, which is always difficult. I think you should be able to set up a questionnaire online using a free website, but I cant remember what it is (sorry!). But I think combining qualitative and quantitative research in the way you are thinking would be an interesting way to go about it. Hope that helps.

Hello- dont know if this well help, but there is a website called songza where you can listen to any song you type into the search engine, though I guess that it might not be too good if you want continuous music; good bit of distraction though..

Hello- sorry to hear about your situation. A similar thing happened to me in that I was told to submit my work early for the review by my supervisors who told me it was good enough, and then the examiners told me to completely rewrite the whole thing in two months. So wasnt very pleased- but on the plus side, I did do it and I have now passed. It sounds to me that your supervisors should have given you more input (and mine should have given me more!), but, and though its easier said than done, try not to feel too despondent- its not really a reflection on you, just how you have been guided in the wrong direction. I now feel much more confident in my work and although it was very hard it was definitely worth rewriting, so it can be done. Good luck..

Hello- I dont know if this is helpful or not, but there was a special section in the THES a few months ago which listed all (or most) universities in terms of rankings and included universities from around the world. They also compared the best universities in the world for different subject areas (like social sciences)but that was slightly broad. Apologies if you have already seen it/is not useful, but I thought I'd pass that on just in case.

Hi Kiori,
That sounds like a bit of a dilemma- from what you have written though it sounds like you would be very unhappy if you moved away from your family at this time. Doing a PhD is certainly a lonely business and I think it probably would make it worse if you were away from friends and family. Having said that, there usually are lots of opportunities to meet people and make friends for students when they study abroad. It also sounds like you are not keen on the idea of going abroad in terms of finding it interesting- could you still do a PhD where you are?

I'm not sure about the research councils- though different universities (at least when I applied) had different deadlines for submission and acceptance of PhD students prior to their proposal being submitted to the research councils before their deadlines. Though that may have changed by now, but good luck..

Hello- that sounds like a bit of a headache. I'd try not to worry too much though, because (in my experience) the deadlines for different universities/different phd's tends to vary quite a lot. If you dont need funding then it should be ok to apply anytime (within reason), but if you do need funding then there may still be a chance. Did your supervisor (for the MRES) give you any feedback as to why he didnt accept your proposal (or what would be needed to get it accepted)? Hope that helps a little, and sorry to hear you've been having troubles.

I'm not sure anyone will be able to give you a list of every university in the world that offers a masters for someone with a third class degree. Would it be an idea to use a search engine (e.g. google) to find a university which offers a masters course in whatever it is you want to do, and then enquire if they would accept you with a third class degree, do you think?

You can get PDFcreator here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

It should tell you what to do.

Yes, they offer PhD's abroad.

'Conclussion" = "Conclusion",

Something which really annoys me, and I'm not too great with spelling or grammar myself, is when people spell "definitely" "definately" and "weird" as "wierd". I really need to get a life!