I always recommend 'transcription buddy' you can download it free from download.com for a 30 day free trial. (if you uninstall it after this period, then you can download it again for another 30 day trial - I have used it like this for 3 years).

Its great because you can add autmotic pauses. So rather than manually pressing pause/play all the time you can set it so for example, it plays 15 secs, rewinds 6 secs, pauses 4 secs and then plays 15secs again, so you continually loop round gradually progressing through the interview without having to touch anything. You can adjust these times depending on the speed of the speaker.

I assume any material will do, I guess natural fabrics are better than man-made but I could be wrong!

ooh, the only one I know is that you brush your hair, and then on the final brush you wrap a silk scarf around your hairbrush and then kind of fake brush or wipe your hair with it and it absorbs all the ions or whatever, particles, I remember something about + and - charged particles or something in gcse science! - I'm a SOCIAL scientists, not a proper scientist!

ooh, I use cutepdf at the mo, I never knew of such a Pdf accessory to office! I will try down at staples - I actually have to design it first so in a bit of a panic!

ok, I only have a free pdf converter though, so it sometimes warps the graphics. And where do I print it? I'm thinking staples at the mo, but not sure if they will charge me big time!

I have a conference coming up soon and need to present a poster. However, my uni is on snow lockdown and I don't event think they have a printing department anyway. I need to print it from powerpoint if possible

Any ideas, it will be A0 or possible A1 size.

my chapter 1 is about 4 pages long and basically a statement of the problem backed up with some statistics demographic stats (my PhD is about a certain section of the population). It then has the outline (2 lines each) of my studies.

my sup always says I should draw a model out of what relationships have been looked at. You can then work out who has done what, more than likely there will be two areas that are similar but use different methods and no one has tried to combine the areas/use the opposing method etc etc.

I'm back for the new year with a sense of panic. I have A LOT of non-PhD work to do and A LOT of PhD work I told myself I would get done before xmas but it just didn't happen.

I want a paper written up by the end of january though so my main PhD aims for today are

- do one piece of qual analysis
- analyse the qual data (now quant) data using a lovely little stats thing that will come to me once I have had a look through my stats book (I hope!)

In the mean time I am writing a presentation and preparing for a meeting tomorrow for non-PhD things :-s

With only six months to go I am really annoyed with having to do so much non-PhD work!

ah everyone seems so productive! I have moved house and everything is everwhere. Most of the big furniture is coming up today. So I was going to spend ANOTHER day sitting around watching films, but have decided to do some work. The interviews I have been struggling to analyse thematically, I now have to analyse them a separate way so going to do at least 2 today - that's the aim!

hmm, well my identity is pretty obvious on here if you read through all my posts. But I'm hoping if anyone I know does work it out they will respect my wish for anonymity, as I do when people PM me. I know a few peoples real names on here, Wal, LeannePhD for example, but will never tell, even if I knew them and they sat next to me in my office I wouldn't say anything! My mum, dad and bro are quite famous in a niche kind of way, so I'm all over the internet in a 'XXX also has a younger sister who hides away like a hermit and does research on an obscure and boring project, her name is Sneaks'

oh, I always thought you were american! - I don't know why. Maybe its because you are always saying how welcomed you are in this country and I thought maybe that the only people not usually welcomed are americans (because they like peanut butter and jam sandwiches) and that's why you were so pleased at being welcomed haha! I don;t know. Maybe I have just driven myself INSANE with PhD ramblings

Bug - I thought americans loved 'jelly and peanut butter sandwiches' ??

urgh - if anyone comes near me with pickle I will scream.

ooh yes, twiglets and xmas, go hand in hand. My husband is very upset they discontinued the tangy ones, but I found them disgusting. Now its odd, he hates marmite but does eat original twiglets, which are clearly marmite based

Factor E is definitely all over the literature. The study was basically a load of interviews. I had to find the themes that people thought made them successful or unsuccessful. SO none of them mentioned Factor E (personality type), but some just came across more like they were Factor E type of people and I got the hunch that they were more successful - although objectively they were at the same success level as everyone else. The literature would say that Factor E people are more successful. But I don't want to say, 'cos the literature says' cos my whole argument thus far has been - everything so far has just tried to confirm what the literature says and no one has actually qualitatively looked at this to find the actual underlying stuff!