Had my meeting; they were pleased with the progress I've made. I'm not, I'm stressed with getting the bloody thing done. They reckon I'm well on track for an Xmas finish. I've asked them to work with me by setting me goals to achieve.

Rant time. Just got a call from my mobile phone provider and was asked: 'Would you like to take out a second mobile phone contract in addition to your existing one?' Out of curiosity, I asked why he thought I needed a second one and should pay twice as much as I already do? Urgh, I'm getting flashbacks to when I used to work in a call centre.

I'll second the unproductive theme of today. I have written up plans for the discussion and a reflection chapter and am just waiting to talk about it with my sups, in a meeting, tomorrow. It's funny in a way, because right when you think things can't get any harder, they do. I now have first hand experience of the three horsemen of the apocalypse, in the form of 3 chapters.

Thank you for the advice, Algaequeen. As it stands, I'll probably have to do a bit of free form writing (zero draft), like you say.

So, the discussion chapter - wtf? How the hell does one go about it? It's huggggeeeeee. I'm just thinking about what I'm supposed to write and preparing for a supervision meeting on Wednesday. I'm actually quite numb about it. It needs to be written in an integrative fashion. It's about the PROM I've made. I need to bring in lots of literature. It needs to be aligned with current health care policy. I don't know where to start, truth be known.

Thanks everyone. It's got the highly accessed badge now. @Bonzo, I actually won the Lottery on Saturday! Only with 3 numbers, so just a tenner. Not to be sniffed at though, because with that tenner I had an evening's supply of Holsten Pils;-)

I can sympathise. I feel really embarrassed when I'm asked to list my GCSE's for job applications - I was never the brightest of souls. I don't even have A Levels. I don't see the point as, however well you may have done as a kid, it hardly reflects what you are like now. I don't see how my RSA certificate in Fashion Through the Ages and my D in Technology affects my ability to be a post-doc, lecturer or whatever.

I've checked the access statistics for the journal article I wrote and that went up online about 2 weeks ago - a new way of procrastinating. Anyway, according to the stats my article has become the most highly accessed one in the journal for the past 30 days and it's going to get one of those 'highly accessed' badges. It's cheered me up a tiny bit :-)

No progress today so far. I just don't know where to take things at the moment. Should I do corrections on the other chapters or a first draft of the hideously complicated discussion. Urrghhh...

Yeah, I can only echo everyone else has said, Chrisrolinski. Just see it as a learning opportunity for the real thing. You'll get a 'taste' of what the real thing is like. Good luck.

Third and final results chapter drafted. I'll e-mail it off and be done with it. I don't know what I have to do next now? There's just so much.

I know why I was getting a negative p-value now. I used the wrong test. It's not my fault though; it was SPSS offering me all these fancy additional tests as an add on to the original stats test I was running. For paired ordinal test-retest data, my good friend Wilcoxon has shown my the way. I've now got p-values that look more normal. None of that minus p-value to infinity and beyond business.

It's official: I hate Microsoft Word and it's weak table drawing powers. My thesis would probably look so much better in Latex.

That's precisely the output for the P-value I got. Thinking about it, it has to be the power of minus 10 to the power of 38 because you can't get a p-value of above 1.0 I don't think. I really hope I haven't done it wrong now, but most of the others look fine.

I've done some sums on SPSS and I have this as a p-value: -3.403E38

Can I presume that that is a very, very small p-value below p= 0.01

I just want to make sure I've got it right. Thanks.