@Caterpillar27: Congratulations!! :-) sooo a nice feeling when you can check a paper as done and accepted!!!

Ok, then, Friday and the weekend were not productive at all, now back to work. This morning was fine, I prepared a draft for a survey I need to run in the next days.
Since I work part-time on the PhD and I have 14 months till submission deadline, I will post here my goals weekly.

So, for this week:

- complete codebook 1
- run reliability test with my second supervisor
- revise block 1 of documents
- prepare draft discussion for article (ch.3)
- prepare email/plan for other article (ch.4)
- launch online survey
- complete draft for conference paper for August

I'm behind with the codebook..hope it'll work, I terribly tend to procrastinate when it comes to doing this analsis..argh!!

Wish a great week to you all!!

Great thread! Please let me join in too!

End of third year, but part-time. Due to submit in August 2014. So, still a bit to go, but motivation is urgently needed! :-)

Today I'm going to work on revising some codes in my analysis and further developing the codebook for the first block of documents. This thematic analysis is taking ages and it's so frustrating to work with words..and continuously discover new, alternative interpretations for them!

Good luck to everyone!!
xx

Done - however there are two points in the survey where a logical connection is missing. Two times there is a yes/no question. If NO, the following question doesn't apply. However answer is required for that question. I've answered them but please make sure you take out my ratings there!
Also: I would add a comment field at the end of the survey, so that this or similar comments can be done there!

Good luck with your study Rach!

To start with: goals of today.

Extra PhD:

- Run an interview
- Preparare a final report of a project
- Do some project admin stuff


PhD:

- start writing paper for a conference in August
- continue preparing some material for exp.1

:-)

Let's go preparing the room for the interview...

Cheers

...that's the deadline I give myself today. Well, it's not really a today decision but it's today that I make it 'official' to myself.

What has been done so far?

1) Chapters 1 to 4 written and defended in the upgrade viva last December. These entail:
- Literature review
- Methodological considerations
- First 2 analyses
2) Chapter 5 written up - needs some revision though.
3) 2 conference proceedings + 1 book chapter published/accepted
4) 1 journal article drafted
5) several 'minor' things likes conferences, workshops, seminars, etc. ('minor' because in the thesis you only list publications!)

What still needs to be done?

1) Prepare a journal article to submit based on content of Ch. 3
2) Analyses 3 and 4 (no.3 currently on works) - these are huge, long text analyses..
3) Preparing journal article based on those 2 analyses
4) Writing up Chapters 6 and 7 based on those 2 analyses
5) 2 experiments (design done already)
6) Paper based on the experiments
7) Writing up Chapter(s) 8 (and 9?) based on the experiments
8) Revise the whole thing and submit

What else I need to do parallel to the PhD project?

Lead and largely run two more projects at my school - with related presentations, publications, follow-up design and fund raising.
Teaching diverse modules.
Spend weekends with my boyfriend.
Plan a possible new house.

The deadline of 13months from now is self-imposed, since this would be the minimum time allowed for part-time PhD at the university.

Feasible?? We'll see. But after 3 years of almost no contact with other PhD students (even though I followed this forum eagerly most of the time - and it helped me a lot!) I thought I could try to 'live' and share a bit more of this last period with other PhD-fellows!!

Hope you won't mind, it would be just great to have the chance to post here regularly and check on myself :P to see how I progress.

So here I start: 13months to go..

Hi Catr!

I'm from Italy, living in (the German part of) Switzerland and doing a PhD in UK! I've been living and working abroad from the very beginning of my PhD, now concluding my third year and hoping to get my thesis ready to submit in Summer 2014.
I agree with TCDSW, each PhD journey is unique. Personally, I regret a bit not having had the opportunity to experience the PhD-student atmosphere in these years, I missed the contact with some student-peers and I can imagine it would have been interesting and helpful to have the chance to participate to PhD activities and courses at the campus. I say, it would have been interesting and helpful, but not necessary afterall.

At the end, the 15hrs/year of supervision can be easily done travelling 1-2 time/year to UK or via Email/Skype. Most of the feedback you get during the PhD comes from other peers/colleagues - particularly from those you meet at conferences or who review your submitted publications!

And then, doing the PhD while working and living abroad also had advantages. Some of them have already been mentioned: developing time management skills, lower PhD-stress level, and - for me - the possibility of working already in a research department in an other university and gaining experience in teaching, fund raising, and getting other projects (parallel to the PhD one) developed and run.

Of course, I'm enrolled in UK as part-time student - otherwise I could not teach and run other projects at the same time! And of course - I'm aware my situation is peculiar, having got a research associate job while doing the PhD. Again, each PhD is a unique adventure.

I think completing your PhD living in France won't create big difficulties. Furthermore, if France is anyway the best long-term option thinking of your boyfriend, then being there already may give you a chance to start some networking that may help you get a job later.

Good luck!!!

absolutely! now it's clear, thanks! (up)

what about something like:

emphasis of the study is on the way their caring role (or carers role?) seemingly spread from their personal to their professional life, entering their experience of and atttitude towards leadership, and on how this behavioural change in turn affects their personal lives.

... ehm, I've to say (but you maybe understood it already)I'm not native Eng, so you'll have to revise my suggestion anyway..but just to give it shot :-)

I'd love to help but I'm not sure I understand the sentence..let's see:

1) we are talking of someone with a caring role

2) this role seems to have extended to embrace other fields/activities

3) these new fields/activities in which now the caring role is palpable are: workspace, attitude towards leadership, and "impact this has on their lives"? what is "this"? and how can the caring role extent to the impact of something?



:-) can you help clarify?

Hi all!

Just a quick post to ask if any of you have experience with the coefficient of concordance, Kendall's W. It seems to be an equivalent of the more 'standard' rank correlation coefficient Spearman's rho, but you can use it for comparing (or: testing the level of concordance between) more than two subjects at once.

I had problems in the past having to compute corr coefficients between more than two raters. Nobody told me of the Kendall'W and I did what many studies do: computed Spearman for each pair combination of raters and then averaged it. The problem is, in doing so I got often non significant coefficients.

Using the Kendall's W (I checked right now) I see that I get a overall level of correlation similar to the average of all Spearmans, but with highly significant p value!!

My questions:

- do you know if Kendall'W is an .."authoritative" test? i.e. if it is something well-known and seen as a good stat? (because I only found it in 1 article so far)
- Am I cheating if I use Kendall's W and claim I have correlations? (that's a general issue, I'm new to stats and always impressed by how you can get different 'results' by changing tests!
- I've found two studies that don't use Kendall's W, rather do the other way - averaging corr coefficents of all possible pairs. BUT: they don't report the p values! I've asked my sup and he only said that's odd, since you should always report p values. I've written to one of the authors (maybe unpolite on my side?) to ask about the p values..no answer.

Don't want to waste your time, but in case you have some knowledge / experience with correlations and Kendall's W and the p values issues, it would be great if you could help me illuminate the topic.

Thanks a lot!

Morning!

Wow, you're all working hard and doing great progress it seems, I'm impressed! (up)

I worked on my chapter yesterday from 7am to 7pm with more or less no breaks, and I've managed to put together the first part of it (7'500 words in total, 2'000 wrote yesterday) and read three more articles I need this morning. And I thought that was a very good day!!

Well, today goals are

- read 3 more articles on interjudge reliability
- write section 4
- plan section 5

It's great to read your comments and follow your progress, being far away from the uni I practically don't have contacts with other phds. Where I work there are no phds either (a centre Europe issue with universities of applied sciences) and I'm simply treated as one of the researchers. But I feel the phd signs indeed a peculiar stage of life, and it's easy to feel alone - especially if you have no contact with other in similar situations. So: thanks for all your contributions to this forum!

:-)

Have a productive day!

Morning all! And thanks a lot Batfink for your welcome!! So, yesterday I managed to sketch the summary parts for the chapter, and now it's time to set the goals for today: writing introductory section and part 1.1 of the chapter. Should roughly be not more than 4-5'000 words.

Thanks for the comment Lindalou, that's exactly how I feel..I postponed for two years this review chapter, it's so much more fun to write "solid" stuff and move on with the project! But now postponing is no option anymore, so..let's do it!

Wish a great day to all, have a productive sup meeting Batfink!

Ok. I'm new here, that's my second post and the first one in this thread. But I've been following threads in this forum for some time now and this morning I feel like I need some extra motivation boost. I'm at the end of the second year of my phd, studying part-time while living in a different state and working full-time as research associate. In September I'll have the intermediate exam to get the full registration as phd student. That means, I have to deliver 3 chapters of thesis at least, a time plan, a few publications/conferences done and then defend the work done so far in a viva.

I have one chapter almost ready (a few corrections needed, material used in a conf plus published proceedings), plus one more chapter which will be published in a book, that means the core material is there, but I have to give it a new 'cut' so to fit the thesis structure.

I'm now fighting with what will be the first chapter of the thesis, lit review. And that gives me huge headaches.
I've read a lot in the past two years but still too little I think, the more I look around the more I find stuff I should insert. I feel my situation is complicated from the fact that I don't belong to one specific discipline, but I have to review a topic (music performance evaluation) unifying empirical research (psychology mainly), philosophy, musicology, sociology. So I find it hard to understand when to stop searching, what to insert and what not, and how to structure the whole chapter to get a convincing and flowing narrative.

Well, that's it. I'm late, I should have sent the material to my sup this weekend and I won't, in the last days I completely lost focus and concentration.
Therefore I'm writing here now, hoping that this will give me a little push to focus for the next few hours and be able to actually move forward.
I feel stuck, that's so frustrating..

My one goal for the next couple of hours:
- start to sketch the final part of the chapter (summary and aim of the study) and based on that go back to the beginning and start re-writing the first section (which needs to be changed I feel).
Well, these are actually two. So first sketching the final part.

Time to get focused.
p.s. Is there anyone who shares the feeling that the lit rev chapter is most annoying one to write??

I agree with Sneaks, you should look at examples in your field. My feeling however is that the words "prologue" and "epilogue" do not belong to a thesis, not even one in literature or the arts (I come from the arts). Fact is, these words have a strong connection to "narrative", and I can only recall seeing them in novels or movies or tragedies (if you go back to the original use of the terms). As such they have a strong temporal component: prologue describes facts that happened before the main fact in the novel, epilogue describes facts that happened after it...
now, it's true that you should always create a narrative in every paper or talk or thesis (my sup always tells me that and I always tell this to my students in turn) but what you are writing is not a story, it is..well..an argument I'd say (isn't that what "thesis" stays for?)

so it's not just that academics don't like changes (which is so true!!) but maybe it's also that these words are actually not appropriate for the kind of object a thesis is..

just a thought :-)