Listen, listen, tap, tap,
page after page, crap, crap,
transcribing all day long, unable to listen to songs,
and now it's the night, yawn, yawn,
hopefully I'll be in bed before dawn.

I'm on the Midnight Express tonight, and probably will be for most nights for the foreseeable future. Never mind though because one day I'm going to finish.

I have 1346 references in my Endnote, which pertains to my journal articles only. In terms of books, I have used 52 and government documents and things like guidelines, around 33.

Yes, I know what you mean keep-calm...Bono in his scruffy leather jacket (that I'll bet smells like a smoky pub), middle aged paunch spilling over his belt and tight leather pants from TK MAXX...nooOOOOOOOOOOO!

Errr, 4 cheeses pizza!!! Get yourself a meat feast in future :-)

This is one big goal for my entire week: Conduct 6 cognitive interviews, transcribe and have the analysed. Use the finding to make justified 'improvements' to my questionnaire and have a second draft ready by the end of the week. That should leave me in a position to do it all over again a following week.

I'd just like to add to TennieV's comment about you being the expert. Being the expert, you'll be aware of all of the strengths and weaknesses of you research, so be open and prepared to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of your research. What would you do differently if you could do it again - and why? Remember that you're PhD represents your journey to become a researcher -and like any journey there will have been times of success, times of despair and times of challenge. It represents how you have grown and developed as much the actual quality of the study itself.

Good luck Lilbobeep!(up)

Got it for you, Chrisrolinki. PM me an e-mail address and I'll send it to you. :-)

My goals for the rest of today:

1) Get ready to present a practice run of my conference presentation to research group tomorrow.

2) Prepare for a supervisory meeting that follows afterwards.

Not much, but it is a Sunday.

I felt I had to post on this thread before getting back to work. Keenbean, I think it's a really good idea. I am someone who has taken too much on and I strongly suspect that it's going to take me 4 years to complete. Briefly, for my PhD, I'm designing a questionnaire but should have just done the content generation phase for it like other people have. But, I was strongly egged on, at a very early stage to actually scale, pre-test and field-test the questionnaire - all for my PhD. I should have put my foot down and said it was too much because now, I have mere months to go and awful lots of data collection left to do. I can't even start to write certain chapters yet because, quite simply, I don't have the results yet. I can't change my PhD because my methodological and philosophical world view is such that I'd have to fundamentally change them. I can't write any more papers because I don't have time. And I'm just tired and fed up with it all. If I'd have kept it smaller, I'd have been much closer to finishing. And all the time, my supervisors say are asking me how my discussion chapter is coming along!
Why not show her two Gant charts; one with your suggested plan and proposed times scales and the original one, so hopefully she can see how realistic it all is? And then mention the money situation as well.

Cat Stevens! 35 days since I last posted on this thread and I have virtually nothing to add! Alpacalover, I know you didn't mean it, but you may as well have put on a dirty big Doc Martin boot and kicked me up the rear, like my supervisors will doubtless do at my next meeting.

A belated happy birthday, Alpacalover. And Sue2604, well done on getting through 23 tomatoes. Now, I'm not a betting man or secretly trying to reveal your identity, but, on the subject of birthdays, I'm going to bet that yours is the 26 of this month (2604)!

The data matrix display I've selected for analysing and presenting the results of my cognitive interviewing works quite well as it turns out, so it's quite a relief. What isn't quite a relief if the fact that I have another 9 of these interviews to do and they each take an 90 minutes to do - crap sticks. One day...one day I won't have to worry about doing this any more.

Really chuffed it's gone well for you, Teek. You'll soon be completely on top of things again. Have to say though, I'm not surprised that the guy who rang the consultants phone was connected to you both in some way. It's all to do with the Six Degrees of Separation. So, I don't like to brag about these things, but I know someone who knows someone x 10E6 who knows Sylvester Stallone. What's more, so do you and everyone else. Best wishes.