Hi there... I was wondering what kind of stuff everyone's including in their appendices (relevant to their methodologies).

What did you or your supervisor consider as too much / too silly to include in appendices, what would be so necessary to include? What will you do with notes, email conversations, questionnaire forms filled by your users etc?

Also could you state whether your research is qual or quant...

Thank you...
:-)

Hello 404
Think of your Appendices as a filing cabinet where relevant materials are kept that are not directly immediate to the text and argument in your thesis. So ~ use the Appendices to contain SUPPORTING items that you must refer to in the text, but are supplementary to that text. Provide a line or two of explanation in the text so that your readers appreciate what is in the Appendix. They may or may not then refer to the Appendix ~ but you have given them the choice. Appendices are a way to reduce the word count of your thesis as well!

Why not use the words INDUCTIVE and DEDUCTIVE instead of qualitative and quantitative approaches to research? These words more accurately reflect what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in explaining the significance of paradigms ~ ways of seeing the world. (See: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) They are concerned with epistemologies and so the former concerns the development of theory as a means of adding to knowledge, whilst the latter concerns additions to knowldge as a result of testing theory. OK??

Even grounded theory ~ often seen as typifying '''qualitative reseach''' depends on high levels of numeric/statistical activity to 'prove' the conclusions fromdata analysis!!! (See the final chapters of Corbin and Strauss.)
Hope that this help you. BYE vernontrafford

(up) really wonderful reply.

======= Date Modified 23 Apr 2010 00:48:32 =======
great reply indeed. I too agree with your suggestion for the use of inductive/deductive. In fact because of my practice-based approach, it helps to refer to them as such. But I was being more generic on the thread.

I seem to have a giant mountain of appendices. And my thesis submission is in two months. But my supervisor gave some good advice on how to compress them a bit more. Also, he suggested that I should take some of the less vital ones with me to viva (after stating in the thesis that they are not included in appendices for such and such reason, but they are available for examination).

It would still be nice to hear some examples from people's experiences though.

Hi 404

I'll also have a mountain of appendices, and I'm doing a qual social sciences thesis. I'll include the plethora of questions I developed as background to the interviews I conducted; the timeline of my interviews and case studies, a listing of confidential material provided to me by my participants, and the journal articles I've written. There will probably be more, but they're the obvious ones.

Thank you for your reply Sue. Do you refer to those journal articles in your thesis, or are they there to support the reliability / validation of your arguments in general?

Also, what's your view about including press cuttings, interviews with you etc?

Yes, I do refer to the journal articles. Since I've written these, am making absolutely sure I refer to them in the body of the thesis, as I want the examiners to know I've been published! I wouldn't include press clippings or any other published material though - I'll just reference these. My appendices are additional material developed by me, not by others. I'll also just include a deidentified list of the interviews I've done.

I see. Thanks again for that. xxx