Department of Marketing

The PhD as A Project:

From Enrolment to Completion

Felix T. Mavondo

Department of Marketing

Doctoral Workshop

4th October 2012

Department of Marketing

My Guiding principles

Every doctoral student is a special project

Each brings their hopes, their personality

and sometimes their family

Each has special needs, working style and

level of motivation and sensitivity

Each brings a culture, previous experience

and hopefully a willingness and desire to

succeed.

Because of or in spite of these the PhD must

be completed!!

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Managing Your PhD

Aims

Optimise time use and speed up project completion

Maximise exposure to the research process and engagement

Enhance critical analysis and synthesis

Develop collegiality with other research students and staff

Have some publications to gain a competitive advantage in the job market

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What are the Phases of a PhD?

From Enrolment to Confirmation

Finding The Research Area

Literature Review Strategies

1. Identify 10 key articles in your domain of study

2. Find the latest publications in the area that

appeared in the top journals

3. Work your way backwards and forward from then

on

4. Learn effective literature review techniques

5. Some degree of wandering is acceptable in the

early stages

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For each article you read

Establish the main findings

What was the sample size and unit of analysis

What research design and methodology were used

What scales (reliability and validity) were used

What do you like and not like about the article?

What future directions of research and limitations are suggested?

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Conceptualisation Phase

Build a model of relationships identified in the literature

Establish the ―gap‖ that you want to contribute to closing-your contribution

Establish why closing these gaps is important (to academia, practitioners, policymakers or others).

Establish who should care about your research

Make explicit propositions/hypotheses

In part these issues are now addressed by the PhD course work ( I hope)

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At this stage you should have

Some idea of how the main constructs are going to be operationalised

Well developed ideas about the research design, appropriate sample size, sampling unit and context of your study

some idea about data collection and analysis

A conceptual paper for publication

You should be ready for your confirmation. This should be about 12 months from enrolment

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Development of Research Instrument

Use what exists!!-This is knowledge

accumulation for the discipline

Always be conscious of the trade off

between a long instrument and response rate

if you are doing a quantitative study.

There are advantages in pre-testing even on

a small sample. Academics and their

students are weird and should be avoided!

When pre-testing establish the time it takes,

the layout, the language and the clarity

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Survey Management

Adopt a total design method 1. Minimise cost to respondent

2. Maximise benefits of participation

Well designed survey instruments offer significant benefits!!

A token of appreciation may work wonders

External (industry) support can work wonders

Data collection is the most hazardous part of the PhD. You do not have enough control.

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Analyse the data Data analysis should be relatively straight

forward if prior work has been done

Students should be familiar with the data analysis approach—this could be taught in other departments than your own

Start with the simple methods that give an appreciation of the data and address the research questions.

In my opinion the most critical chapter in the thesis is Operationalisation of constructs- measure reliability and validity and generalisability.

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Writing up In some sense my students never really

have a writing up phase.

They learn to write early and submit drafts of chapters for supervisor comments

The supervisor should read every word in the first drafts and make many comments

It is often desirable to submit of some chapters for publications—conference or journal

The advantage is the free feedback. It is great to know you are on the right track

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Writing up (cont’d)

Effective project management suggests that by the

time data analyses begins you should probably

have completed three chapters

1. Introduction

2. Literature Review

3. Research Methodology and Operationalisation of

constructs

Ideally you should have a complete layout of the

thesis by this stage one must have fully developed

the hypotheses, be familiar with analyses to be

performed

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Critical Chapters

Introduction

Methodology

Final Chapter

1. Main findings

2. Implications of study for

Academia

Managers

Policy Makers

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The examination Process

1. The choice of examiners must potentially

be done during literature review but

definitely no latter than six months prior to

submission.

2. Candidates MUST be conversant with the

work of the examiners—failure to do so

may spell disaster

3. Avoid recently qualified PhD’s they are

over zealous and intolerant of differences!

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Problems: My Personal Experience

Some students take very long to settle

down—they continue attempting to change the

topic or focus of study

Poor communication with the supervisor—in

some cultures saying NO is not encouraged

yet in our system it is strong encouraged

Failure to have frequent scheduled meetings—

this encourages drift. The rules say once a

fortnight!!

Inadequate feed back from supervisor and

provided late.

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Problems (cont’d)

Supervisory Failure

The student –Supervisor relationship breaks

down—This is delicate but must be managed

Incomplete sharing of expectations

Supervisor is a mentor—the student has

responsibility for the work

Student doing to much work unrelated to the

PhD

Supervisor losses interest in the project and

does not provide adequate feed back on time