For your career interest you need to do a professional Doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a registered provider. I'd not see much point putting yourself through a traditional PhD. Take advice on researching an area so close to home. For example counselling courses advise you can't become a trained counsellor in an area you've has counselling in unless that area of your life has been under control for a certain period of time. You are still very young, you have time for a few career changes :)

I only live about 7 miles away but commutes into a large city means that takes me roughly 1-1.5 hours each way so 2-3 hours out of my day each time I need to go in. I can't be very flexible either because of it and can't stay too late. It's a pain. I have no choice though as I have a family and children at school. This means I didn't get the social life I was sort of looking forward to and instead I'm hoping I can spend less time at uni and more time at home in year 3 so I don't loose so much time to travelling when I should be writing!

I agree with the comments that for all intents and purposes it is a creep towards self funded education. Chickpea that's an excellent point. If we take loans out to undertake research projects already dreamt up by Depts and supervisors people will actually be paying to work! Again much like self funded NVQ- you do free work exp that's a requirement of the course and also pay course fees - why you do it- you can't get paid employment without the NVQ!

Hmmm. Not sure. First thoughts. Total marketisation of education. Convince employers candidates need qualifications (the quote about needing more PhD's!)- see NVQ's as a more basic but strikingly similar example...like you really need an NVQ 2 in cleaning to work as a cleaner! Do you really need a PhD to teach etc. Get people paying for qualifications you've convinced them they need, even better get them in debt for them, more interest payments!. My worry, studentships will decrease and rather than increasing equality of access poorer students will be buried under a debt mountain bigger than a mortgage! Their new higher salaries (if they can get one) leads to a lower take home pay after loan deductions so they'll still not be earning the same as those that can afford a PhD without debt. Oh and banks will make more money off their debt but their outgoings will mean they prob won't pass affordability testing for future loans and mortgages.

I've given chic before. Seemed to go down well.

I need to use a Mac with Final Cut Pro. We have an edit suite that is small and gets busy plus the round trip in really cuts into my work time. I can't find anywhere about renting one, syrely you must be able to? Any ideas please.

Themed chapters is an excellent recommendation,. Also, really try not to have any repetition if possible, each chapter is supposed to say something new. If you are using the same quotes across chapters to illustrate several points then def do what the others have suggested and put them in the appendix rather than write it out each time. Well done though, better to have too much and whittle down than not enough.

I have 2 children 5 and 6 yrs old. It is doable, infact I am finding it easier that full time work because it is more flexible. The hours depends a lot on what you are doing. You will not need to be at a PC on library for 40 hours a week, lots of those hours can be done ruminating over ideas whilst you hoover and wash the pots!

You have to be more clever with your time and focused e.g. there are students in my uni who don't have children and def put in full 40 hours+

I don't put in as much time because I make sure everything I do is as focused on my own PhD topic as possible. I have made as much (more in some cases) progress as my colleagues. I find children make me more focused and less likely to wander off topic. I'm always ahead of deadlines because I have to plan for the dreaded month doing nothing when both come down with Chicken pox etc!

I used to transcribe in a past job in a solicitors doing Police and solicitor interviews. Foot pedal is a must! decision on you transcribe or a professional depends what you want from the data. If you want to find themes across lots of interviews etc get professional and use something like Nvivo. You also might not need to transcribe everything if you have a structure for certain things you are looking at e.g. people doing identity wirk might look just for 'I' statements etc.
Of course the beauty of transcribing it yourself is, although painstaking it really does help with analysis and although ti seems like a big job at the time it will make analysis easier in the long run because you will know your data better so it's swings and roundabout really.

Yes awsoci UK external examiners are paid and also receive reasonable expenses for travel and accommodation. If they agree to be an examiner they receive a letter of appointment from the examining university. It may not be in their usual everyday job description as you say and it is up to them if they take on external examining duties. Maybe it works differently elsewhere?

Hope all went well at Viva! Best wishes

I agree with all comments. Not helpful I know! As an examiner they are paid to look at the Thesis, it's their job, it's not a hobby or done out of kindness so there should be guidelines in my opinion of when someone can reasonably expect their Thesis reviewed by after amendments. This would also probably limit 'mithering' by students wanting to know when work would be back. However, as this is not the case and the examiner might be picky take the advice from Ian and go through your supervisor.

All the best

Depends on the regulations of when you need to submit a finished thesis by. Has your project gone through ethical approval or are you still writing up for ethics what the project will be? You need to make some decisions fairly quickly on what your theory/model is.

I've chosen this as I've just watched a news report on it about 5 mins ago (not my area just an example)

E.g. say the problem is the under recruitment of Engineers in the UK. You could look at it numerous ways
Policy - Why is this happening, what policies are there to recruit Engineers.
Theory Marxism, Foucault, Cultural Historical Activity Theory etc, what theory has been applied previously that might be useful to this problem.
Methodology, If large scale interviews and quantitative data is usually applied in similar studies what might alternative approaches offer e.g. case studies of an Engineering employer or semiotic analysis of visual cultural representations of Engineers in the media.

So you see what you need to do is make a decision NOW, what is your gap, what new knowledge are you going to offer. It is usually easier to use existing theory/method and find away it will be novel by either (a) apply an existing theory/model to a new problem you identified (You then can just take their model so don't need to formulate your own) or employ a theory/method not usually applied to the problem.

Good luck.

Two chapters about 7-10 thousand words each in 8 months is so doable. They don't have to be your best work, they will change with your data. Do you have to do this other project?

All is not lost. Depending on your area most people spend the first year not even knowing what their research project is going to look like or have any real research questions! What do you need to do for your upgrade? Do you have an upgrade?