Hi all,

This I guess is a specific query for the social sciences guys out here, cos I know this answer may well vary across the sciences/research group projects, or for that matter even project studentships.

For those of you who are individual students, not part of a larger project in the social sciences, when did u get the *precise* fit, the *exact* design for your EMPIRICAL work? I mean, the exact proposal of THIS is what my questions are, THIS is what I need to do, THIS is the time frame precisely in which I aim to do it, and THIS THIS THIS are the specific sub cases, methods etc and etc etc....?

We all enter our PhDs with a proposal but GOD, that changes!! So, around when did this empirical clarity emerge?

Thanks guys!

I had the basics when I started and ran that as a pilot study into my second year. I had to make radical changes to the method following that and then those radical changes didn't quite pan out to plan either wich shot my time frame all to hell. :p

So basically, the empical method kept changing as I ran into problems.

My research design was quite iterative - I knew I wanted to do an ethnography, but I didn't know early on what I wanted to find out so I just went off for 2 months, kept a fieldwork diary, photocopied every document I saw and got contact details for everyone I met. Then I spent about 8 months reflecting on the ethnography and reading, in order to develop some research questions. Then, at the start of year 2, I began in-depth interviews which were focused on my new research questions. Needless to say, the way my thesis has ended up does not resemble my initial proposal very closely, except for the fact that I wanted to study the civil service up close and personal.

I think, if you can, be as flexible as possible. You might find, for example, that having done a few interviews the same few themes come out again and again so before doing any more interviews, you can modify your questions to address these themes. Also, I found that (although this might be more true of ethnography than other research methods), when I came to write up my 'data chapters' this steered my thesis in a slightly different way to the one I was expecting because I preferred to let the data 'lead' me rather than attempting to fit the data rigidly around my research questions.