Hi, have returned from my holiday, determined to salvage my PhD. Have thought of a way of rewriting my findings which will hopefully improve things. At the same time, I need to get on with my methodology. I'm always a bit unsure of this, not coming from an academic background, I am very uncertain and easily tripped up by talk of paradigms, theories etc etc. Could anyone recommend a really clear guide (social sciences), that would finally sort it out for me. Many thanks.

PM me your email. Also, this website is good if you're doing qual work http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk/methodologies.php

Hi sunflower - I hope you've had a good holiday. Are you doing qualitative or quantitative research? If you're doing qualitative, I can recommend these books:

Flick, U. 2009. An Introduction to Qualitative Research.

Willig, C. 2001. Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology: Adventures in Theory and Method.

I might be able to help you a bit more when i know what you're doing! Did you go on any research methods courses?

Nx

Hi Sunflower

I found Robson, C. (2002) Real world research: a resource for social scientists and practitioner-researchers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. really useful.

I too have Flick (2006) and have used him and quoted him but hated the book (sorry Natassia!).

Also really handy, short guides to different types of social science research at http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/index.html - most of them are only about 2/3 pages long so easy to read quick.

I have found the best ( and easy to understand!) guide to be the charts in the Sage Handbook on Qualitative Research--the charts outline the different paradigms, and their ontology, epistemology and methodologies...easy to read! I have loaned out my copy of this so cannot refer to the exact pages, but someone else might have it and be able to post.

thanks for your helpful replies - I will go to the library tomorrow and try and get the recommended books. Sneaks I have pm'd you my email address. My research is qualitative, and I am working with people with dementia and their carers and getting their opinions on a certain area. The only course I have done is an IPA one, but I have only really done a general thematic analysis on my findings so far.

I found Doing Qualitative Research by David Silverman pretty helpful, as is Social Research Methods by Alan Bryman, if you want a quite basic but solid all-rounder

Hi Sunflower21

I have just finished reading a short chapter by Pat Bazeley (2007) called 'Analysing qualitative data: more than identifying themes'. I downloaded it for free off the net (sorry I can't remember where as it was something I downloaded ages ago and had the intention of reading!) and personally found it really useful, as it provides several clearly explained strategies for data analysis.