You can find a fair bit in qualitative research about about locating yourself and explaining how you, as the researcher, influenced how your research developed. Feminist methodologies often talk quite a lot about this, from a first person point of view, or you could try looking at narrative studies - Riessman for example has some interesting points about explaining your positioning. You could look at:

Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 1993. Narrative Analysis. London: Sage Publications.

Any of her articles would have some similar points.

How you refer to yourself depends on your discipline and the tone of your thesis. You could try something like "As the primary researcher, my background [blah blah was important because]."

I hope that's useful, and good luck!

Hi there - I feel your pain, I've just finished transcribing 50 interviews that were between 1 and 2 hours each. It was a slow process, and I did transcribe everything word for word, ums and all... I did it gradually, usually after each interview, so it didn't end up too bad.
I don't know if I have much advice, other than hang in there - do a bit every day, and you'll get through it. Slowing down the recording helps, have a foot pedal or an easy pause/rewind button but I'm sure you know all the technique tips :-)
Best of luck!

Hi there,

I'm pretty shy as well and I'm doing a lot of one-on-one interviews for my research. I find it helps if you think of it as playing a role - you are the official interviewer (or even psychiatrist-type person!) and you are listening to these people in your professional capacity.

To be honest, the interviewees are probably thinking more about what they are saying and how they are coming across than what you are doing - people are often happy to have someone really listen to them.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

I've been using Vovici as my university has a subscription. It's not bad, lots of nice features but a few bugs - I think survey monkey is easier to use overall.

Thanks guys! That helps a lot. I will have a look around and try some of them out. Have a good day!

Hi everyone! I'm just about to start a series of one-to-one interviews for my (qualitative) PhD research, and I'm looking to buy a digital voice recorder. Does anyone have any recommendations for a mid-range, reliable recorder? I've been looking at Sony and Olympus, but I'm not sure what to make of all the different features. Is there anything I should look out for in particular?
Thank you for your help :-)

Thanks for your help everyone - met the supervisor today, and this comic pretty much sums up my life:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1371
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1372

:-)

Thanks guys, unfortunately admin isn't too forthcoming, and all they could give me was the page limit (30-50). It is incredibly long, but I'm more used to the idea of it now - I'm just not sure what to do about my supervisor not reading anything. Did I mention I have to present this proposal in a week? Not happy :-(

Yup - positive! It is long, but we have a different system :-) it's quite a detailed proposal (but not what I thought, apparently...)

Hi everyone,
I'm incredibly frustrated and bit at a loss as to what to do... I've been working on my thesis proposal for a year, regularly sending updated versions to my supervisor for comment. Her responses are generally: this is good, cut it down a bit, add in x, y and z. So I've finally come up with a final version that I'm happy with, and I send it to her. Her response: it's too much like your actual thesis, and not like a proposal. You need to start from scratch (?!?).
I'm dumbstruck, because this means that she apparently hasn't read it until now, and even though I have been regularly asking for guidelines and examples for how the department wants the proposal, she has always said "we don't have any" or "it's fine, just needs to be shorter". The only guidelines I have ever received are about number of pages (30-50 by the way)! I feel like I have wasted a year of really hard work, and I really really want some concrete guidelines so I can write this cursed proposal and actually start my research.
Any suggestions from the wise people on this forum? Should I say anything about why this hasn't been brought up at all over the past year? Or should I just be quiet, and do exactly what she says (in the hope that this is the correct type of proposal for the department)?
Thanks for listening.

A couple of other suggestions:
Grice, Paul (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, “Logic and Conversation”, chapter 2 pp. 22-40.

And a book called "Discourse analysis" by Rosalind Gill.

Did you see Scollon's book already?
Analyzing Public Discourse: Discourse Analysis in the Making of Public Policy

Good luck!

I've "cold emailed" and found that some people do reply - I wrote to 4 or 5 people, and 4 of them have replied (one just to say that she was too busy, which was understandable!). So it can't hurt to try! Good luck.

All the time! Glad to know I'm not alone...

Thanks for the encouragement! I'm working at home too, and turning into a bit of a hermit... hopefully I don't completely lose all social skills :-) I will set weekly goals as you suggest, thank you!

Thanks Teek - that helps :-) I do feel held back, I had a clear timetable and I was really motivated about sticking to it, and getting things ticked off on my list. This just makes my coursework period 18 months instead of 12, delaying when I can start my fieldwork etc. But I'm trying to work it out - I figure I may as well use the time to learn stats better, try and publish a bit and attend some conferences... but you're right, it's really important to feel like you're going somewhere! Thanks again.