Yes, my own PhD began with work done in my MSc research and continued by including a review of a decade of professional practice. Some suggestions...

Deductive route: you could introduce this material in the literature review, critically examining your previous work and extending it theoretically. That revised, updated and novel theoretical model would then be tested through experiment, empirical observation, action research etc.

Deductive route 2: Treat the previous work as a hypothesis to be refuted/tested/investigated. Here you would take an impartial stance, looking at your work as if it were someone else's published theory that you had reason to be interested in.

Inductive route: use the prior work as initial observations, conduct further empirical observation to supplement that data, code and categorise the data, and allow theory to emerge. Or use further data for focused coding.

In all cases, you will not be able to copy and paste the MSc work. I'd also advise you to seek some novelty and strong theoretical outcomes that allow the work to meet the requirements of a PhD.

======= Date Modified 22 Nov 2010 17:52:53 =======
I'd like to offer a solution if the prospect of writing a dissertation appears more than a little daunting, if time is limited or you just want to get it done quickly. I recently prepared a step-by-step guide for my MSc students that began as a replacement for the usual module guide, and emerged a lot more comprehensive.

http://www.electronjournal.com/taming/Onions_2010_Taming_the_dragon.pdf

A free downloadable PDF, it is a draft version so any comments and criticisms will go a long way to making it better.

Regards, Patrick ([email protected])