Thank you all so much, this forum is really cheering me up at the moment :-)

I sat down with my husband last night and read the criticisms together so as to soften the blow a bit. It turns out that the reviewer's main issue was the fact that the paper wasn't 'conceptual' enough and that I didn't define the word 'governance' at the start... all in all the criticisms were a bit strange because it ended by saying that the paper had 'a lot of potential' and 'would be of interest to the journal's audience'...ho hum. After reading the comments I think even if they had been generous enough to accept it with major revisions I wouldn't have done them because it was never meant to be a conceptual article in the way the reviewer wants.

Drwhoknows - I feel your pain. Good luck with future submissions.

Thank you!! I'm not normally one to take things like this personally but I'm feeling pretty wobbly about the whole thesis at the moment and it would have been nice to have a publication accepted as some kind of objective proof that I do actually have decent ideas now and again.

Bah!

I just got an email to say that a paper I submitted to a journal has been rejected. I haven't brought myself to read the full comments from the reviewer yet - got as far as "conceptual weaknesses" and "unclear methodology" and closed the email to avoid getting upset - I'm going to the office Christmas party in an hour.

I've emailed the guy in charge of putting the special issue together to let him know but can't face telling my supervisor yet. We don't have a fantastic relationship at the moment and I feel he'll be pleased that I've had a setback (seriously, he's not the nicest guy).

Some kind words would be much appreciated :-)

Thank you for starting this thread - it's something I've been thinking about but would have been way to scared to try anything new like Latex - I'm a bit of a computing wimp. Our department uses Century Gothic for all its publications which I hate - makes everything look like it's been written for primary school pupils! I was planning on the same as Missspacey - Times New Roman 12pt etc but I might be a bit more adventurous now.

Congratulations :-)

Are you going to change your username to "temporarily a bit less stressed" in celebration?

I love John Law. I totally ripped off his argument from 'Organizing Modernity' in my thesis but the one time I met him I was too nervous to say anything! I guess you could say he's my first academic crush :-)

Don't know of any seminars as such; I guess you could keep checking the Lancaster university website (where he is based - sorry if that's stating the obvious) and his own page on the site which has a bit list of other publications (including obscure working papers) that might be of interest. The idea of 'messiness' seems to have really taken off but I've not come across any other publications which deal with it as a major theme - does anyone else know of any?

I used uk.easyroommate.com (sounds like it's for people with dubious morals, but it's not!) and found a really nice room in a flat with a mature student who needed to rent a room to pay the mortgage. Have you thought about some kind of quiet excercise like yoga or pilates? You'd still be surrounded by other people but at least they wouldn't be making too much noise!

Hi all,

Has anyone had any experience of contacting their research participants after writing up to check if it's ok to use a quotation from an interview? To give some background, I conducted interviews with civil servants who would only agree to participate if I later showed them a draft of my thesis so they had an opportunity to say if they felt they were being misrepresented or if they didn't want a particular quotation to be used. (There's also a methodological justification for this called respondent validation where basically the validity of your argument is increased by having the support of your research participants, but that's another issue).

I keep putting it off because I dread them all turning round and saying I can't use their stuff because it's too sensitive or paints the department in a bad light. Has anyone had experience of participants changing their mind about being involved, refusing permission to use material, or anything similar? And if so, how did you manage the situation?

My sister and her 2 kids are emigrating to New Zealand next week so we had to all exchange presents on Sunday so they can pack them into the shipping container - kinda feel like Christmas is over and done already! I have to say I try to avoid walking down the high street at all costs at the moment because I hate the general chaos that takes over (and the fact you can never find what you want in the supermarket because they've moved it all around to make room for boxes of blinking biscuits)! We're going on our postgrad Christmas meal next week, to Wagamama which is about as un-Christmassy as you can get too!

I do like Christmas, just not in the mood for it yet. Maybe after the 17th when I've had my last supervision meeting of the year and can relax it will kick in a bit more!

Hi Buzby,

I know exactly what you mean. I had an episode over the summer where I went to a conference and one idiot (and I know now that he is an idiot) ripped my work to shreds in a very humiliating way. I came away feeling like nothing I could do would ever be up to standard and in any case, why was I embarking on a career which involved so much bitchiness and self-justification?

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'm over that now and here are some of my little things that helped:

- make a list of all the acheivements you have made since starting the PhD. Include EVERYTHING whether directly thesis-related or not. E.g. giving a conference paper, organizing a seminar, getting an article published, making a great contact with someone in your field, organizing and carrying out fieldwork, writing x number of chapters, learning a new computer program, explaining your research to someone in a really effective way, doing some teaching/demonstrating, organizing a postgrad social, EVERYTHING. It's suprising how much you've acheived.

- speak to people who got their PhD a few years ago - people who have since moved on in their career. Most of them will tell you that they are now a bit embarrassed by their thesis because their ideas have developed, or that they never published anything from it but it never did them any harm, or that they see now that it was a 'training excercise' in how to do research rather than the best thing they will ever write. It's important to get in perspective that the PhD is a step along a road, not something final which has to be 'perfect' and rock the foundations of your discipline

- speak to people who are still undergraduates. Better still, mark their essays - most of them are truly awful! It makes you realise in an instant everything that you have learned and perfected about reading and summarising literature, structuring arguments and using an appropriate writing style to construct a polished and intelligent piece of work. These are all the things you slowly develop while doing a phd but no one ever mentions because they are so hung up on the ideas.

Hope this helps :-)

That's fantastic! my thesis is about how expertise is negotiated between civil servants and scientists... I'm thinking a re-enactment in the viva, where I get to be the civil servant and my supervisor can be the scientist and I get to hit him with a non-metaphorical big stick :-)

Have you tried looking in one of those big compilation books of research methods and perspectives? Something like Denzin and Lincoln's 'Handbook of Qualitative Research' should point you in the right direction. I had a quick look in my dictionary of sociology (trusty old friend from the undergrad days) and it defines 'heuristic device' as "any general concept which is framed merely as an aid to analysis" and 'frame analysis' as "the examination of this organization of experience in general and in particular terms e.g. what makes a joke a joke, or a mistake a mistake, and to the 'vulnerabilities' to which any frame is subject"

Don't know if that helps or not?!

If you look at www.jobs.ac.uk you will be able to see adverts for lectureships and get an idea of the payscales. As far as I'm aware there isn't much variation in pay between disciplines; on my university's human resources pages it states that the minimum pay for a lecturer is £31,500 regardless of the faculty they are in. However going straight from a PhD it is more likely that you would take up a postdoctoral, research associate or junior lecturer post which would obviously be less well paid.

No idea about US jobs, sorry!

To be honest it sounds like you are in a really strong position because the external doesn't know much about your subject area but has a personal passion for innovative research methods. One of the joys of qualitative research is that it's all about the interpretation - YOUR interpretation - and as such you are the expert on what the data has to say. If the research findings justify the methods then that's a good enough reason for choosing a particular approach over others.

It might be worth spending some time before the viva reflecting on what your research would have looked like if you had used alternative methods, if you haven't included that sort of stuff in your conclusion. I read a book recently which I thought was really imaginative in justifying their choice of methods because it explained what would have been missed if the conventional approach had been used.

Thanks so much for posting all the tips below - I'm not planning on submitting til September but still have a periodic panic about the viva!

With regard to your original question, is your external someone who has expertise in your methodology or your subject area (or both)? A friend of mine did a phd using visual methods (giving people cameras) and chose an external who also uses visual methods so the viva was almost exclusively about research methods and the actual research subject (the monument people were photographing) wasn't discussed much at all. I think it all depends on how contentious you think your research method is - if it's an accepted way of doing research in your field I wouldn't worry too much, they won't be out to get you! Congratulations on submitting!