I have to complete my PhD by September 2009 (Juggling teaching alongside) . Having just completed my field work , am starting the qualitative analysis, how long do you reckon i would need , ( i understand this is a highly subjective question) but...

Is 3 months (from Oct-Dec) realistic , if i need to set aside at least 9 months for the completion of the various drafts of the thesis and viva.

Any advice on how I could organize and manage this would be very much appreciated as this is stressing me out so much.

thanks a lot

cheers
m

I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter what deadline you have, you will always struggle to meet it. If you must submit by September next year, you should agree a submittal date (with your sups) of 6-8 weeks prior and do you darnest to meet it (so you have contingency). In terms of your project specifics, I can't really say for sure as it depends how much analysis you have to do. That said, if you can get all your core analysis and diagrams done before Christmas (and you work to a July 31st deadline for final submittal) you have 7 months to write up/draft/re-draft etc. This is feasible even allowing for some additional analysis stipulated by your sups. The trouble is, your goals are too broad. You'd be better splitting the wider goals down into smaller chunks, setting a deadline for each of those. So I'd work up a task list, assign durations to each and then prioritise them. Perhaps if you can break down as far as weekly targets, you'd give yourself the best shot of meeting your broader goals.

Hence, the workload itself is perfectly achievable, from here on in it's about you being organised so that you can achieve it.

You might also want to consider:

The tools you'll be using for your qualitative analysis. Some people just use word processor to handle the data from their interviews; which is something that I do not understand since it is like walking barefooted on the rocks. That obviously takes a lot more time than using software purposely designed to do it.

The kind of analysis your are doing. Pure grounded theory where by you approach the field with out any predisposition towards specific theory, can take much longer than the analysis of a case study or a survey. On the other hand, with qualitative analysis it is almost impossible to tell when the analysis stops and the writing up starts, since you'll find yourself analysing as you are writing (again, depends on your project), which makes writing much slower than reporting what your findings are, as in quantitative projects.

The other thing you need to consider is that it is not a linear process; the more you get into the analysis (and writing up) the more progress you can make in less time. At the beginning it feels like you are only reading your notes, with out finding what to write, but once you pass that initial barrier the story unfolds a lot more easily and at some stage it becomes just filling in the gaps and feeding in the data to what you already have.

The best advice I can give you is to tackle it right away without too much thinking or planning, you'll be doing a lot of thinking while you are writing and analysing, and you might have to stop anyway at some point to do some planning before continuing, that's ok... it is impossible to plan for everything and then just follow the plan, you have to let it be dynamic and evolve as you are making progress... so, do not stop, just keep going.