Hi again,

I feel a little foolish coming back to the parallel line running thru this thread :-) but what you both say is very useful. While gender does not in any way feature in my work (my focus is on age, and literacies development acc to age through the teen age span, and the role of cultural mediation, and general stuff about interpretation and such), yes 'larger' questions indeed are to do with competencies to deal with complex media environments, media forms designed to manipulate, and so on. While I admit there isnt a gender thing happening in this, I'm guessing there is a way in which to frame it via participation, civic, collborative learning and similar...

hmm thnaks magic and sleepy, gr8 help :-)

And PS: not wanting to get myself into this, but make up and be friends now you two? (Bug smiles over her specs and pretends she is a granny sitting and knitting in the idyllic countryside)

Imagination running riot....

Hi sleepy,

Although this topic is now highly tangetial to this thread, thanks a bunch for the help :-) Much appreciated. am filing for a couple of years later.

Hmm, i do have a top female scholar as my sup, but am afraid my research has nothing to do with women... i work with young people (teens) and their digital literacies etc and social networking sites and other youth/internet stuff...

hmmm...

Will try of course, and fingers crossed! tx

to be repetitive for sleepy may not have noticed it in my post, but sleepy, any tips on BFWG?

xo

Hi, completely agree with sleepy. In my case, i am intl so automatically ineligble for RC funding, so nobody will expect to see that on my CV. However, also didnt get ORSAS and similar for I somersaulted out of a US fellowship into a UK PhD as late as 19th June 2008, and well, all of the intl awards closed in Feb/march.

Then on, I got a pretty generous (£7000) dept award, and this continues this yr as well to be my main support. Other sources: I got a school wide thing, then 2 little grants for my fieldwork. Doesnt that count? Of course it does as much as it should in addition to the stuff like Juju says. getting funding is great (it augurs well for the future), in may case RC is out of the Q, and all people 'expect' is the big intl awards like ORSAS which is wehn I explain my somersaulting story and that I didnt want to wait a yr.

So, just go ahead and work on tiny little things.. every bit counts (on CV, in experience, everything).

Sleepy: v glad that you mentioned BFWG. Canyou shed any light/tips on this? May apply 2011 or 2012...

xo, Bug

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Agree with Magictime... although (very very thankful about this) I had not been able to take a year out, and managed the stuff Magictime mentions, but at the cost of near loss of sanity. I did get the distinction, did do good applications (to 7 places) and things worked out well but I realise at the end of my first yr that I am perfect on the timing end with no gap year anywhere but *completely* drained out otherwise.

So, if you can (CAN is the keyword) go ahead... I couldnt...

Hi, you have answered you own question! If you want a PhD (which is out of the question I think for a Sept 2009 start) then you will apply for it!

Different schools have different entry times. Often some places which have mandatory coursework which begins in October with the rest of the school wil only take Sept/Oct entries, others may differ. Funding, you do not say what your situation is, but there are roughly two kinds of funding: research councils which are open to EU/UK, and overseas scholarships fro intl studetns both share Feb/March deadlines and are announced around this time or a little earlier. The second is departmental funding in the form of studentships which may have a slightly later summer deadline but is announced around now as well.

If it is funded out of a research team's grant or is part of a larger project then deadlines may be more relaxed and you may have other things to consider.

The key thing is to start early and know what your funding source will be/who you would like to be supervised by. Establshing contact, preparing a proposal, applying in time for money to come to you, I would suggest at least one year of pre planning. So if you are looking at an Oct 2010 start, now is the best time to get things going, for funding deadlines are around 5-7 months away.

Hi, to add and be repetitive... my BSc was in geography and my MSc in media and communications and am doing a PhD in Media and Communications :-) Good luck!

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:-) Thanks much for the 'passionate and elegant', just the two adjectives I love!

Doubtless there are deeper questions here. Look at funded projects from the ESRC and the AHRC that fund qualitative research. Or EC projects that fund projects with qualitative elements, does sample size not matter? Of course it does. I'll speak from my field... have a look at BBC or BBFC or BFI supported audience research projects where scholars contributed outside of academia for research that speaks to policy and so on, of course a certain number of focus groups and interviews were needed. That is what I do for my own research too.

I think 'to matter' itself would be a rather confusing term. Matter for what? For whom? This above is one kind of mattering. Another as I said, is what I find when occasionally I browse through anthropology journals instead of sociology (not implying crude mappings here)... when I see the instances I have spoken of below, that I realise that much of research that happens in these areas, that do not per se interface with policy and similar, or borders on humanities or tilts towards it... there it would be a largely irrelevant question...

I do a PhD where I have a strange task and position. I come from a non disciplinary background, I study media and comm, but am neither a sociologist first, nor an anthropologist, nor anything of worth... I merely did my undergrads in geography (entirely useless for media till now) and then Masters in media and comm and here I am in just a couple of yrs from rivers and glaciers over to a phd in media. In my PhD I am working with, hang on, hold your breath: psychology (!) and literary aesthetics (!) to do research with digital literacies, that also interfaces with the policy literature....

Torn i truly am! From psychology I am trying to retrieve elements of social constructionism and leave out the quant, from literary aesthetics I am fleeing to retain the best and also retain my identity as a social science researcher, from digital literacies I am trying to escape being called a technological deterministic, and the policy element...alas, some say it is too normative for any kind of 'critical' research....

and all of these have different ideas of sample size and why it does or does not matter....

I am afraid I have only added to the questions here, and not answered a single one... for whether it does or does not matter will depend I think on (inter)disciplinarity (anthropology or psychology for e.g.), domains (purely scholarly, or policy relevant) and of course personal opinions....

What would sample size be for an ethnographer who spends 10 years studying kinship patterns in one community? Or, what would sample size mean for a critical discourse analyst who is studying two texts, or for a semiotic theorist who is studying early childhood literacies of two children?

I am neither of these, and I do 'social science' research with N and all similar... but I do interact with these fields which are all 'foriegn' to me, and I know they do extremely meaningful research...

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Hi. You cannot submit something as a PhD without having it started as a PhD (ie gone through registrations etc) at first. The only university in India whose PhD systems I have any knowledge of need you to register under a 'guide' and then do the stuff you do and then present the thesis. You can't just do some research (whatever its worth) and then present it as a PhD. sure it can prepare you for a phD and may even make a phd potentially quicker for the knowledge you've got but definitely not what you suggest.

ALthough, regrettably enough, there are places/univs/guides there who could 'get this done' for you in a year or two. Yes, regrettable and quite nauseating.

I think this may be a PhD in semiotics and liguistics, in which case it is entirely qualitative and could even have examined just a set of 10 texts. Semiotics are not my area but renowned scholars have done much in the area...

Gunther Kress is one of them...he has done lovely work with children's writing, alphebtical and graphical modes of representations and he works with one or two children's alphabet formations at times...

Go away and do this somewhere else.