Dear All,

To start off a little bit on my background.. My PhD in the area of Management Information Systems ( a grey area between computer science and management) . The topic of my PhD is ‘innovation in the hacker community’.


I am investigating the process of innovation in the virtual community of hackers ( you are probably wondering why hackers!!! I worked for three years in cyber crime before this hence the interest :-)


I have almost completed my fieldwork except for a few interviews over the next three weeks after which I intend to spend 2 months on analysis and then start writing my chapters..(or is it meant to be alongside? Not sure)

but here is the problem ..but the end of next month my supervisor asked me to give him the details of the chapters I am going to write and the timelines for each of them ..

I am a little perplexed as I have no idea on what my core chapters are going to be although I have broadly categorized them as Introduction, Literature review , methodology , 3 core chapters and conclusion …

I would appreciate any inputs from people who have structured and designed their chapters with deadlines for each? What was your approach, did you decide on the subsections of each chapter after your analysis or alongside? and how did you decide on the time for each of them..

Any help is much appreciated

Thanks very much in advance


Cheers
mira

This won't be much practical help,
but read this
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd052206s.gif
it might make you smile!

My thesis structure is pretty much like yours, but I had subsections detailed as well in my thesis plan. It doesn't matter if you stick to them particularly, but its good to think about how each chapter will flow - just leaving it as one block in your thesis plan makes it a big block to fill later on! And a lot goes on within an individual chapter.

When I first sat down to do a plan, you're right you have no idea and you just have a blank document. But once you get going, it comes together pretty quickly (up)

In terms of deadlines and timetable, my literature review, methodology and regional background first drafts I did in a week or so each - very short timescale and very hard work, but they were mostly based on my 1st year report (though saying that, my lit. review had to be substantially revised) or I had been working on them on and off. The other chapters I'm leaving 3-4 weeks ish for as I was writing as I went along. Pretty tight though, and I expect to over run.

One thing, I'd leave more than 2 months for analysis? I suppose it depends on your field (I'm in the Sciences), but I have been analysing through out my PhD, and surely a PhD requires more than 2 months? It doesn't seem in proportion with the rest of the 3 years. You'll probably find you analyse alongside chapter writing too.

In fact, this brings me on to a wider point - for me it wasn't helpful to block my whole PhD into literature review, data collection, analysis, chapter writing. Because all of these tasks were naturally going on at the same time, and it would have hindered me if I'd split them up.

Hmmm sorry, this went on a bit...

Hi Mira,

I'm glad you started this discussion because only with this kind of chats we can organise our thoughts and bring them down to the final writing up of the thesis. I have to warn you though, there is no easy way to go about it and the more you try to rush it the more frustrating the whole process becomes. So I recommend that you have some patience, especially at the start of your analysis and writing.

Your project must be very similar to mine, since I'm studying strategic change in organisations due to the use of ICT. It is a case study, so it is qualitative and based on in-depth interviews, among other sources of data. I have 7 chapters: 1 introduction, 2 literature review on organisational change, 3 more focused review on strategy and technology and theoretical framework, 4 methodology, 5 case study narrative, 6 analysis, 7 conclusions.

So, I suppose the best way to go about your question is to break down the task. Now, because of your deadline, the first thing you need to do is to structure your thesis. There is a book that I found quite helpful:

Rowena Murray, 2002; How to Write a Thesis; 2nd Edition.

I'll give you some advice from the book in another post. In my experience, if you do not know where to start structuring the thesis, it is very difficult to come up with something like a table of content, or even titles for the chapters. So what you should do is to start writing down your ideas after the appropriate prompts (I'll give you some in the other post), and then the structure will emerge.

To outline your thesis structure try to write to these prompts:

Background/Context/Review of literature/Introduction
.The subject of the research is important because...
.Those who have worked on this subject include...
.What has not yet been done is...
.The research project aimed to...

Theory/Methods/Approach/Materials/Subjects
.This study was based on the approach of...
.This approach was chosen because...
.It was likely to achieve the project aims by...
.Others have used this method to...

Results/Analysis
.The steps in the research involved...
.Analyses were conducted by...
.Data/information/observations were gathered as...
.These were organised into...

Discussion/Interpretation
.Analysis suggested that...
.This interpretation was based on...
.Taken together the analyses show...
.Research aims were achieved to the extent that...

Recommendations/Implications/Conclusions
.Future research is needed in order to...
.More information is needed on...
.Practice could be improved by...
.Proposed changes would be feasible if...

Pick each set of prompts and try to answer them in a different document. Some of it you can not know, since you have not finished your analysis, but by know you should have an idea,so try to write as much as possible without having to go to the literature, just try to squeeze out everything that is in your mind, and then it will be a lot easier to spot gaps that need to be filled.

Armendaf, that looks like a fantastic way to structure it! Then all you have to do is make it flow. Thanks so much.

A

that's some really solid advice, but I think that before you take it you have to look at the big picture (i'm in the faculty of arts, so it may be different). First, what's the thesis - what are you actually arguing? Once you've answered that, then you can start thinking about how you're going to support the argument (ie methodology), why the argument is important (originality), and where it rests in relation to existing studies - then your structure naturally arises out of this. I think supervisors too often push for time-plans, thesis outlines, when they should be encouraging us to think about the really big stuff - the 'so what?' questions.

Hi Mira -

I just noticed that you haven't logged in to the forum in a couple of days. I'm just posting here so the thread does not lag to far behind just in case you want to pick this discussion up when you are back.

Dear Armendaf and everyone ,
thank you all so much for your advice on structuring the chapters ...this is so beneficial for me as well as other PhD students struggling with the writing up process

cheers
m