“Prevention is better than cure.”
“I think the bottom line is students are incredibly dependent on their supervisors…”
A PhD is hard – by design. But it isn’t meant to be impossible. It is an unusual student that doesn’t experience some form of obstacle along the way. Some students will find themselves struggling through many obstacles.
In this series of posts we’re going to consider some of the most common obstacles – as outlined by students and supervisors – and provide tips on how to overcome the obstacle. By drawing on experiences of other students, we hope to help students from having to overcome these obstacles on their own. Some of the obstacles we will cover will include:
- Too many questions
- Finding the right proportion between theory and practice
- How to evaluate my work’s originality?
- How can I make sense of so much information?
- The appearance of progress instead of real progress.
- Nothing to report.
- Finishing in 3 years
- Disagreeing supervisors
- My supervisor is an idiot; why should I listen to him?
- Writer’s block
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to all the students and supervisors who contributed to this collection.
Obstacle: Too many questions
“I have so many questions, I’m not sure where to focus.”
Tips
1. Prioritise your questions
Try a pair-wise comparison (a bubble sort), where you take your questions two at a time and decide which is more important (more feasible, more appropriate, more satisfying, etc.) to you. Repeat, until you’ve compared them all and have a priority ordering.
2. Get other people (your supervisors, your supervisor and a colleague) to discuss your potential topics while you listen.
They are likely to expose constraints, implications, pragmatics that you haven’t considered and may be able to refer to additional literature.
3. Flip a coin.
Doing something is better than sitting around agonising about what you might do. A ‘quick-and-dirty’ exploratory study could help clarify what’s worth pursuing.
4. Once you’ve decided what your focus is, stick to it.
When you find yourself asking interesting new questions, write them down and put them into a shoebox under your bed (or equivalent) for safekeeping – they can fuel the rest of your research career. Anything that falls outside your focus goes into the shoebox.
Obstacle: Finding the right proportion between theory and practice
“My research is related to a very empirical field, therefore most theories are generated by observation and explanation of some phenomenon. My problem is to find the right relation between the amount of existing theory I need to present and the amount of practical experiments I need to conduct. How much of the developed theories should I introduce in my work?”
The role and relative proportions of elements such as theory and empirical evidence in a Ph.D. is culturally and individually influenced. That is, there are different expectations in different disciplines (e.g., a social psychologist might expect a discussion of epistemology, whereas a chemist might not), and the nature of the particular research project imposes requirements. Hence, there is no single answer.
On the other hand, every doctoral candidate should understand the relationship of his or her research to existing theory: both how the research is shaped by theory, and how the research informs or contributes to theory.
Theory is invoked in dissertations in a variety of ‘roles’. Most typical uses of theory are: situation (locating your work in the context of existing thinking), motivation (providing justification of the research question and approach), mastery (demonstrating your knowledge of the discourse and of existing work), contribution (using your findings to extend, confirm, contradict, refine or otherwise contribute to theory).
Tips
1. Seek exemplars.
Find good example dissertations in your field, and analyse how the evidence/theory balance is handled. What is the range of treatments, e.g.: how little or how much theory is included? How exactly is theory used in the argument? Can you identify the key theories in the domain, and how fully (or selectively) are they expressed?
2. Consider what role theory plays in your thesis.
- How much of the developed theory is pertinent to your work? In what ways is it pertinent? Exactly how does/might existing theory shape your research question? For example, are there gaps or limitations in existing theory that you are trying to address? Is your research theoretically-driven, and if so how do your hypotheses derive from that theory? Is there an absence of theory that you are trying to overcome, and if so how will your methods generate new theory?
- How does your work contribute to theory? Can you articulate precisely where your findings impinge on existing thinking?
- Have you provided a sufficient account of existing theory to demonstrate your mastery of it? (Note that ‘sufficient’ need not in this case mean ‘comprehensive’.)