I'd urge a little bit of caution - its crap not having a supervisor, my hubs went through it and had to submit his thesis when only me and him had read through it and it was horrible not knowing if it was good enough or not.

I'd talk to him frankly about his motivation - is it that he wants publications? or is it that he actually thinks that route would be better for you and your PhD?

ok, I think I've got it now - may have to re-read all my work to make sure I've not used the wrong one haha! oh dear.


Actually I've only used method as a title so far (up) will make sure I use the right ones in the right places from now on!

(sprout)

^ that's what my brain feels like now.

what's the difference?


and yes, I know I should probably know this now. But I don't (sprout)

Sorry, I've looked, but think 1959 is too early for my access.

ok a dog walk in the sunshine has eased my anger somewhat. Now, I've faffed and faffed all day long, I need to get my goal done.

Goal that must be done: re-work method and analysis section!

I feel really de-motivated now, and I was just getting into my chapter. Now I feel like going over the lit review and shouting "see - look here it is!!! here's my WHY" to an empty room. :-s :$

ok, I'm now angry too :-s just had an email saying my lit review is too much 'what people have done' rather than 'why I'm doing it'. - even though I thought I had tons of stuff in there. Problem is my sup flicks through stuff once, skims it all and misses key things so I have no idea whether she really means this. ALso, she's refusing to read it properly until I've written the other 3 chapters. NOw, that's fine, but they are obviously leading on from the lit review, so if I go off on a tangent in the lit review, unknowingly, then the chapters will also be rubbish - hence wasting another month. :-s :-s

======= Date Modified 15 Jun 2011 15:40:05 =======
double post - too much pavlova!

Ady - don't be afraid to repeat stuff throughout. I've been doing a lot of that in the last week. And yes, you start going a little crazy thinking 'where did I read that before, was it in my method, my intro or in my study?' but my sup has told me to keep it all in for now and when its read as a whole we'll go through and take anything out that seems like its repeated *too* much, but in general she said there's no danger in hammering things home. If that means you have stuff in your intro, which you then expand on later, then I don't see the issue of having it in 2 places.

Liklihood is that your sup will read it and think you've done too much of it and then say something like "how about having this in the intro" - cue :-s

Batfink - have you checked how your data comes off the survey? I've had several students end up with datasets of every cell being filled with '1' because they set it up wrong and we've had to do a lot of faffing to get their data out of it and useable.

Spent the morning faffing about with food shopping and handing the final version of hubs' thesis in - all the paperwork is now signed, so we only have to pay his fees :-( and he's a doctor :-)

My goal today is to re-work the method and analysis section of my first study.

I think it all depends on the data you have and what you want out of it - sorry that's a bit vague! It will also depend on how accepted qualitative methods are in your field. In my field, they're treated suspiciously - my sup for example STILL wants me to count the frequency of codes, she doesn't understand that what I think is that I've only interviewed 20 people, so counting codes in my opinion is silly, as there aren't enough people to represent the population. I can see why people desparately want to say "20% of people said xyz" but it just wasn't for me!

However, I've not reall used content analysis, so there may be other differences between the two apart from the counting thing.

I've not used content analysis. I have used template analysis which is basically pulling themes out of text and creating a 'template' - basically a hierarchical list of codes e.g.

1. Dog Expense
1.1 Dog Food
1.1.1 Dog treats
1.1.1.1 Chicken Dog treats
1.2 Dog Toys
1.2.1 Frisby

And so on. There is a really good website here for this http://www2.hud.ac.uk/hhs/research/template_analysis/ I think the main difference is that you (well not necessarily) don't count the codes, so there is no quantitative output. THere is an emphasis on that if something appears once in one interview, then it could be as important as something that appears 20 times across several interviews.

I have a good pdf book on qualitative methods if you want it - just PM me your email.

======= Date Modified 15 Jun 2011 14:14:34 =======
============= Edited by a Moderator =============
======= Date Modified 15 Jun 2011 10:01:02 =======
now, to be fair, he did sod all for most of the time he was working and I forced him to sit down and finish it off (he'd done 90% of it before he started working). < just trying to point out that although it was hard, it wasn't like some massive after-work slog every night of the week for 2 years.

My sup has this habit of saying "you need to focus on writing X" and then when I meet her again, she says "why were you writing X, you should have been writing Y!" so now I've got to the point where actually, I just need to do what I need to do, and I igonore her advice about scheduling. I suggest you do the same - get the model done if that's what you need to be focusing on. Or at that stage you could block out 9-5 on model development and 5-8pm writing. Its crappy, but it will only be a few months of it and then its done.