lol. Unfortunately my hair is reasonably fluffy, so it has a kind of cousin It look about it. ;-)

I have really long hair. TBH I'm not much of an upkeep person. If I'm lecturing or have an important meeting, it gets a GHD-ing but about 340 days of the year its just left to be its wavy/frizzy self. If I work at home I stick it up and then my glasses get stuck in it when I put them on my head :p If at the office I keep it down so I can drown out the noise of my office mates with my lucious locks ;-)

Oh and I never ever blow dry it - always leave it to naturally dry,which take about 3 hours on average, so I always wash it at around 6-7pm if I know I want to go out early the next day.

I'd carry on, I supervise MSc dissertations and at the moment my lot are doing data collection, but I know I'll have a few that still haven't really done anything yet.

While he is away its important you understand the literature, and the rationale behind the study. I'm not in your area, but the main thing I get my students to do is to focus on hypotheses they want to test, as this guides the rest of the dissertation.

The main thing you have to do is plough on through the self doubt as it will all click at some point. but don't waste a week panicking - get a good lit review and hypotheses (if that's the kind of study you're doing) written.

Also - think about going to see other lecturers who are teaching on the same course. Its summer, some (particularly senior) academics tend to disappear as its the only time to get on with research. It may be you can get more support from another staff member.

I'd agree with HazyJane, my sample was skewed because it was already a restricted population and I'd bugged the male half of that population to the point where they were probably going to take a restraining order out on me lol.

Why not target some online male communities like football forums or car forums (stereotypical - me!? ;-) ).

I've got a deadline of 1st draft to sup = 29th July. Then I'm going to spend 2-3 days with her solving the key issues in mid-august. I reckon I'll just hand it to them - she's already sorted my examiners. Our uni is Super-lax when it comes to admin, they probably don't even have an 'intention to submit' procedure.

Goal 2 done, I've eaten lunch and had 30 mins procrastinating on facebook.

Now..

Goal 3: To draft out chapter 6

I have a gender skew in my research. There's nothing I could really do about it, so just added it in as a limitation in my qual stuff and controlled for it in my quant stuff.

right. Goal 1 done. I've also done some other work that needed doing.

Goal 2 is to go out and get food for the week, which will involve putting on make up.

on the plus side, that's chapter's 1-5 in full draft, and only chapter 6 to do before sending to supervisor. ALthough also should rattle out a structure for the discussion chapter.

lack of council tax is a bonus though, so its not all bad. :-)

thanks Delta, I'm going to be assertive and go with how it is (until my sup rips it apart for other reasons anyway).

THis is probably why I'm in my fourth year!

is it posisble to say you are a researcher instead?

Thanks both, I've Pmd you Delta, in case you have any words of wisdom on it. Its quite dull though so try not to fall asleep (only sent you a paragraph, but its still possible in my experience)

ok - I'll bow down to your wise words :-)

My sup says my writing is sometimes too timid - but I get scared to say things I haven't done (well in my mind I haven't done), and also, she goes the other way and has got us into trouble on publication submissions by saying things like "the results found that x=y" when we haven't even measured y. bonkers.

Anyway. I'll go with address :-)

agree that remedy is far too strong

So my research is doing loads of stuff that previous research hasn't, but its kind of just the starting point.
So... I've explained the problems with the previous research and I want to put something like

"therefore this study addresses these limitations"

But not sure if 'address' is really suitable, I mean it doesn't solve them by any means, merely a starting block.

Any ideas for alternative wording? Manchester phrase bank seems to just have 'remedy' which has the same issue I think :-(