Hi everyone!

At this rate, I believe I will only be able to start my data collection in the summer, 2 months before my 3rd year. I am in the social sciences, and was wondering how bad this would be? I am planning on doing all my data collection in year 3, analysing my data and editing in year 4. There is NO WAY I can do any data collection before the summer (it is taking me a long time to formulate my theories/models to guide the kind of data I will be gathering)


Am I screwed?

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.