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Writing a PhD dissertation as three (or more) papers to showcase versatility

One of the things I resented the most was not getting the guidance I required for a lot of the work that came with the PhD degree. There are things, of course, where I did get advice, and one of them was to write my doctoral dissertation as a package of three papers focusing on a coherent theme or thread. This idea came from my PhD advisor who was originally trained in physics. But I still wondered how we got to that point.

Why are PhD dissertations comprised of usually 3-4 distinct-yet-related papers? Nobody really answered this question when I asked it during my doctoral studies, so I spent some time reflecting on it over the past year or so. Book-manuscript theses can be seen through this lens.

My doctoral dissertation is still a book-length manuscript, but you could very well excise three distinct articles out of it, should you wish. I am in the process, in fact, of turning it into a peer-reviewed, solo-authored book!

I was a bit puzzled because I kept hearing “to me, a PhD dissertation can offer at least three distinct original contributions to the literature”, particularly from my PhD advisor. Personally, I think that’s right (3 distinct contributions) and could apply to book manuscripts (3 chapters, each developing one strand of an argument, or each examining one empirical case) or theses-by-papers.

I came to realize why I agreed w/ this model a couple of weeks ago.

While sitting with one of my PhD students (yes, over the holiday, that was literally the only day we could meet up), I explained to him how different theoretical approaches and empirical strategies could yield similar results for his dissertation.

And then I said…

“One way in which you can demonstrate the versatility of your work is by showcasing how water insecurity can be seen through X, Y and Z theories. Another way would be to examine A, B and C case studies (where you seek to explain variation across cases and impact factors).”

To this day, nobody has yet explained to me why we do the “a PhD dissertation can be a collection of 3 papers” model, but I have rationalized why, and it makes sense in my head. Over the years, this is how I have mentored my PhD students, but I feel like it’s much clearer now.

ots of universities now encourage the “PhD-dissertation-by-papers” model, and seen through the lenses of “argument/empirical versatility” I feel much more confident championing it. I know STEM disciplines have done this for long, two of my brothers have Mechanical Engineering PhDs and they did their dissertations this way.

Given that I’ve successfully helped graduate several of my PhD students now, I am confident I can continue using this model for future research projects that my doctoral students decide to undertake. Hopefully this post helped cement your confidence in this model. And I feel confident this approach could also be applied to help craft each chapter of a book-length dissertation should you desire to do so.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 23, 2022

We are globally burnt out and we need a global reset. How to create a global system of care?

I have a hypothesis about what we are seeing right now: students, faculty, everyone on the planet is exhausted of this pandemic. This absolute exhaustion is yielding poor outcomes on everything: low attendance, missed work, missed deadlines.

We are all burnt out, folks.

And herein lies the rub: we can’t individually self-care out of this rut. Somehow we need to engage in global collective action to create conditions that make our lives slower and gentler so we can recover from the global collective grief and loss that we’ve experienced.

We can’t “return to normal”. We need to create a new normal where risk assessment and policy choices are not individualized but the result of collective genuine care for one another.

We literally need a global transformation. We aren’t “returning to normal” because there isn’t one to return to.

The old normal was leading us down a spiral of collective burnout. This pandemic highlighted how poorly prepared our societies were and are for shocks of this magnitude. The old normal left us with many stressed individuals trying to cope with dwindling resources.

Terrible.

This new normal needs to create systemic conditions of care that value human lives across multiple groups. Otherwise we will just try to return to a system where we try to recreate the contexts that left us in this rut in the first place.

Time for a global transformation.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 21, 2022

Using a Ventilation File to help break free from writers’ block

I used to hate on the Ventilation File and this blog post is about how I changed my mind about it. The Ventilation File is a document (or a folder with a series of documents) where you go vent (hence the name) and dump your frustrations regarding your writing rut (if you are in one).

But then I figured that:

(1) writing up my frustrations would give me again the tactile sensations that make me enjoy writing (typing in a computer).

(2) I can use this text for a blog post that others can read on my site whenever they feel equally frustrated as I was.

I DO feel better, having gotten the frustration out of my chest, and can now focus on ACTUALLY WRITING.

Hopefully the Ventilation File strategy to getting out of a writing rut will work for you too.

For those interested, here is the text of my Ventilation File this morning (April 1st, 2022)

I’m frustrated with my lack of time to write

Writing has rarely been this hard for me, and it’s April 1st, 2022. It’s not that I don’t love to write (I do). It’s not that I am not good at writing (I am). It’s not that I don’t know what I want to write (I do know). It’s the overwhelming and sheer number of responsibilities (and meetings!) that I’ve had to attend over the past few weeks, the many things I’ve had to do for others (letters, committees, care work, etc.) and the reduced amount of time I have had to actually sit down, think and write. I don’t feel in a rut, and I do feel that I will get out of these many meetings because I just finished a week where I had 27 hours of meetings scheduled (out of 40!). But I really need to get back to reality and to doing the thing I love the most. I do enjoy teaching, and service, but I really need to be able to write more. Even my very early morning writing time is compromised because I’ve used it to catch up on stuff that I had to prepare and send. This is incredibly frustrating.

And for the very first time in my writing career I am using a Ventilation File. This approach was pioneered by David Sternberg in his book “How to Survive and Complete a Doctoral Dissertation”, and taken up by (and popularized!) by the incomparable Joli Jensen in her book “Write No Matter What”.

I will confess that for decades, I was skeptical of the Ventilation File. Why on Earth would I need to write down my thoughts on why I was feeling in a writing rut? This seemed like a useless strategy. Then I read Sternberg. Then I read Jensen. And today, April 1st, I just needed to get this out of my chest. So I have basically written about 315 words worth of a rant that will go on to my Ventilation File.
It’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 1, 2022

We lack serious training in research methods choice and selection

As most of you who follow me on Twitter or read my blog probably know, I have been teaching research methods courses for a while now (mostly at the Masters and PhD levels). Thus I have been reflecting on issues related to training and teaching research methods. This morning, something really hit me as I was preparing an asynchronous lecture:

We lack serious training in research methods choice and selection.

We keep saying “choose the method according to the research question”. But this requires that the student KNOW multiple methods, for data collection AND data analysis. Moreover, developing criteria for method choice and selection requires students to learn heuristics that can help them build decision trees and models of the type
“IF research question 1
THEN (data collection method 1 AND data analysis 1)
ELSE search RM”

This is why research methods training is very hard, and why it’s imperative that whoever teaches methods goes over the details of multiple methodological and empirical strategies, using case studies: so students can see for themselves how researchers make methodological choices. I choose ethnography as a core methodological strategy because it helps me understand the lives of individuals facing water insecurity, toilet insecurity, and those who work in the informal waste sectors. I know how to use many other methods, but I make an actual choice/decision.

My research output in the past couple of months

One of the reasons why I assign multiple empirical analyses in my courses is that I want my students to learn HOW different researchers and research teams have made decisions on which methods for data collection, analysis and presentation they used. Which heuristics did they use? I was thinking of teaching an advanced course on ethnography, and realized that one of the ways in which I have learned how to improve my own ethnographic work is by reading book-length ethnographies. I have read many! I’ve learned about the decisions ethnographers made.

We need to change how we teach research methods. We really do. We need to seriously engage with the challenge of teaching method choice and selection. I believe one of the key gaps in methods training is method choice heuristics. How do I know how to choose a method to answer a specific question? How do I make a choice that gives me the answers I need? These are key questions that faculty teaching research methods need to teach students so they can, in turn, answer them.

Posted in academia, research, research methods, teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 15, 2021

Should I specialize during my PhD or should I branch out?

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega teachingOne of the questions I get asked more frequently (by either my own students, and by others who reach out to me at workshops or via email) is whether they should specialize or not during their PhD, and sometimes earlier in their careers. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m a very eclectic person. I work across multiple disciplines (political science, human geography, international relations, public policy, public administration).

I straddle several fields, from comparative public policy and policy transfer to social movements to water governance to waste and discards management. I am methodologically diverse and use multiple theories in my work and as such, I encourage my own students to explore across disciplines, theories, methods and approaches.

When I did my undergraduate in chemical engineering, I did not want one specialty, so I went for two: food science and engineering, and chemical plant design. I did the same for my PhD (human geography and political science), and even there, I did other things: international relations, public policy/administration (on the political science side) and economic/urban/environmental geography (on the human geography side).

Methodologically, I’m also quite diverse: I do mixed methods, but I have a very strong ethnography slant. I also do experiments (particularly field experiments), archival research, spatial analysis and social network analysis.

Which takes me back to the question itself.

I am not 100% sure if one should JUST pursue one line of inquiry or several. If one should just specialize in ONE area of scholarship or broaden the scope. For a lot of people in academia, it’s hard to fit me and my work into a mold, e.g. I’m not just a political scientist. I’m a public administration scholar to the PA/PM community. I’m a human geographer to the geography community. And I’ve even dipped my toes in economic anthropology and the sociology of consumption. That’s because my work on water insecurity and the informal mechanisms of waste governance is legible to, respectively, anthropology and sociology.

With my own undergraduate, Masters and PhD students, what I have done is that I’ve taught them multiple methods, but within a relatively well-bound area of scholarship (water conflicts, homelessness policy, care policy, older persons’ policy, food insecurity policy). Various methods/theories, ONE field.

I’m a senior professor now, so this “trying to fit me into a narrow box”, branding exercise is much less of a burden for my career, but I try to help my own students by helping them shape a trajectory that makes their work legible within a discipline & a field, while maintaining … a healthy interest in broadening their research interests down the road.

For example, two of my recent PhD graduates continue to do work on subnational water conflicts, but have moved away from the ones they did in their PhDs and started studying other cases. One of my Masters’ students is now moving on to doing a PhD and is thinking of ways to make his earlier research on homelessness broader, but still within the same topic (possibly using multiple methods, comparing different cases, etc.)

So, I don’t want to give advice, but if asked, my advice would be to seek advice from a broad range of scholars and look at what fits you best, particularly for whatever trajectory you want to pursue.

Batch Reading, Highlighting, Annotating, Scribbling

I don’t regret having broadened my work early in my career, but I am not sure whether it hindered or helped me progress. But again, I’m senior now and I have a permanent professorial job, and therefore I do not have to worry about this as much.

To summarize, only you know what you want to do, and the people who know you and whom you trust can give you sound(er) advice. Do whatever fits you best, though I always recommend, make your work legible to the communities you want to work with.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 7, 2021

How to write field notes (and how to teach the writing of fieldnotes)

Writing is hard. And writing field notes is hard, too. I don’t think that there is enough guidance on how to do it. I’ve written about the use of ethnographic fieldnotes in scholarly written output, but I don’t think I had ever written about how to write fieldnotes and how to teach or learn on your own how to write better field notes.

Working and writing everywhere

Given my extensive experience as an ethnographer and fieldworker, I felt that it was important that I wrote a Twitter thread (which I am now converting into a blog post) on how to write field notes, along with references and citations that might be useful for people to read.

Over the past three weeks, in my Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation class, we have covered Coding, Theming and Writing Field Notes and Analytic Memorandums. These are classic components of qualitative text analylsis, and I discussed them in great depth. I believe that’s part and parcel of QDA.

In my Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation class, I went over what I believe is the core of a field note: I use a notebook, and on one side, I write my observations of whatever I am studying, alongside with the date and time. I make detailed notes (also noting on the left hand side of the page). Usually, the left hand side of the field notebook pages serves me to note my own emotions, the context, etc. This is not an uncommon approach (left hand side “emotions/context”, right hand side “phenomenon we are observing”) but others may use a different approach to mine.

But in my view, that’s also part of why it’s so hard to teach how to write good field notes: many/most of us may not be willing to show anybody else our field notes (for privacy/sensitivity issues, but also because they are primarily for us). And yes, despite good books on field notes.

Now, here’s the thing: you can teach how to write field notes, and how to write GOOD field notes, but then there’s the question of how do you write good ETHNOGRAPHIES? As I have taught my Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation students, my own personal bias is that a field note and an analytic memo are DIFFERENT.

But to teach how to write good fieldnotes we also need to educate our students on how to write excellent ethnographic prose. For that particular purpose I have two suggestions:

1) Read A LOT OF ETHNOGRAPHIES, particularly book-length.

2) Read books on how to write ethnography.

Teaching Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation has already changed me and the term is not over yet. I have been able to spend a lot of time pondering and thinking about the craft of teaching how to do good qualitative research, and it has benefited me enormously.

So, my take home suggestions. If you want to learn how to write good field notes:

1) Read books on field note writing
2) Read books on writing ethnographies
3) Read well written ethnographies
4) Practice writing field notes
5) Practice writing analytic memorandums.

and…

6) Practice writing scholarly outputs.

Hopefully this blog post will be useful to readers interested in qualitative methods.

Posted in academia, fieldwork, qualitative methods, research methods, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 12, 2021

The Memo-Based Writing Strategy: Helping students write large-ish (>2,500 words) assignments

I found a request on Twitter by a professor on how to help students with “large N word” assignments (3,000 words, 5,000 words, a thesis). This is something I have thought about frequently because contrary to what people may think (with all the writing I do), I am actually not verbose. I hate having to comply with a certain number of words, because frequently I’ll find myself at odds with the target. How can I write that many words, if I am so concise in my writing? Therefore, I spent some time reflecting on this issue and pondering a potential strategy for this professor so she could use it in her teaching.

Along the same line of thinking. I recently taught for the second time my full-fledged, 40 hours course on “Strategies of Academic Writing and Empirical Research Inquiry”.

This time, I reversed my pedagogical approach.

Highlighting, scribbling marginalia, reading, writing

Before, I used to teach my students how to ask a good research question, how to narrow from a broad topic to a simple, researchable question.

This is a wonderful strategy IF THE STUDENTS HAVE ALREADY READ A LOT AND HAVE MASTERED THE LITERATURE.

You see the problem here, right?

This strategy works well either teaching They Say/I Say (Graf & Birkenstein) style of argumentative writing first and THEN a repertoire of reading strategies (starting with my trusty AIC method) or teaching argumentation in tandem/parallel with reading strategies.

The Memo-Based Writing Strategy is incredibly helpful for people like me, who are not verbose, and who struggle to PRODUCE words. If you are rather verbose and have the lucky ability to just vomit words, more power to you. I am not able to do that.

Focusing on memos HELPS.

I helped my students decompose THEIR ENTIRE DISSERTATION in memorandums, and put them into a Gantt chart. Once we went through the exercise, they realized that writing a thesis is not as major as one would think.

Think about getting ONE memo, 75-125 words, 15 minutes DONE.

memo review of the literature

A brief memorandum reviewing the literature on homelessness.

If your students are worried about a 3,000 words assignment, perhaps the best way to think about it is a 2 week (10 days worth of work) assignment with 150 words per day. This could possibly be manageable.

That’s how I deal with my own writing: one memo at a time.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 14, 2021

A proposed heuristic to choose which note-taking technique we should use: Index Cards, Cornell Notes, Everything Notebook and Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) rows/Synthetic Notes

As most people who read my blog and have ever taken a course from me or attended one of my workshops (or even follow me on Twitter), I really love writing blog posts and Twitter threads that will help them in the future adopt my techniques. As most of the people who have read my blog or attended my workshops or taken my courses have at some point landed on my “Note-Taking Techniques” page (under the Resources tab), they always wonder when do I choose each type of medium to take notes on.

Reading highlighting scribbling annotating

As someone who is VERY analog, I usually take notes by hand on physical media (Everything Notebook, Cornell Notes, Index Cards). I do, however, understand why several people might be interested in knowing how to convert my methods to the digital realm, and/or use a hybrid mixture of digital and analog, as I do when I write Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) rows, and/or Synthetic Notes.

Reading highlighting scribbling annotating

I wrote a Twitter thread explaining my method, and because Twitter is somewhat ephemeral, I thought it would be better if I stored it in a blog post.

Because I’ve chosen this as an article I’m going to read in much depth, I need to first decide how much time I’m going to spend on it and how I can systematize what I am going to learn from it.

First step: go through the headings and list them. This exercise provides me with the paper structure and helps me think through which order and categories these writers used. I normally do this on a separate notebook or a piece of paper, or a block of detachable pages, as I did in this case.

The choice to write a Cornell Note comes from knowing the authors AND the topic. This paper was written by early career scholars (ECRs), whom I strongly wanted to support, and it has a topic (fieldwork) and a focus (teaching guide to train graduate students) that I definitely want to engage with very deeply.

Note how I have added a quotation (with corresponding page) to my Cornell Note. Also note how the authors identify 3 areas of current disagreement about fieldwork – purpose, where it occurs and how long it should be, following them with their own definition. Irgil et al use each one of these areas of disagreement on what fieldwork entails as both signposts AND Topic Sentences. In three consecutive paragraphs, they pack A LOT of good ideas on why political scientists disagree on what field research entails.

This means that I will neex to write Index Cards: I want to make sure to be able to use those Index Cards in my teaching and in writing the pieces I am preparing on fieldwork.

So what happens to those “extra” marginalia scribbles? I could do several things:

1) Type them into Mendeley (you can highlight and add marginalia to PDFs).
2) Transcribe them into the “Notes” section of the respective CSED row.
3) Copy them on to the back of this Index Card.
4) Copy them on to my Everything Notebook (I’ll probably have an entry for this particular article, where I can add these notes to myself).
5) Copy them on to the Cornell Note I already created for this article.

So many options! Decisions, decisions!

In the end, I believe…

What about the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) row entry and the Synthetic Notes?

One question that I often get asked that I did not originally discuss in my Twitter thread is the combination of analog and digital in my reading, annotating, systematizing and absorbing (RASA) conceptual model of my workflow. As my blog post linked before indicates, from an AIC Content Extraction, I drop the contents of my notes on to a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) row. If I feel like I may use these notes relatively soon into the future, I’ll write a Synthetic Note, which then can be converted into a Memorandum.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 16, 2021

Lessons learned from designing a qualitative data analysis and interpretation graduate-level course, from scratch

I have been teaching graduate-level courses for a very long time now, but my methods teaching has increased several times over because I am now associated with FLACSO’s Methods Lab, so my teaching load is much more focused on methodological pedagogy. Over the past year I’ve taught Comparative Methods, Qualitative Methods, Research Design, Research Methodology, Thesis Seminar, Mixed Methods. This Spring, I was asked by my students and colleagues to design a “Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation” course for Masters and Doctoral candidates and potentially faculty who might be interested in the topic.

Preparing a course using the Everything Notebook and handwritten notes

In this post, I am going to share with you a few insights I learned from designing (from scratch) a qualitative methods course. Disclosure: I was the Editor for the Americas of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. I apply qualitative methods in my research (though I am a mixed methods person and feel equally comfortable with quantitative methods). I teach qualitative methods. I write and publish methods pieces.

All this is to say: I’m most definitely not a newbie to the field/to the methods. Nevertheless, despite NOT being a newcomer, I invested a lot of time and money preparing to design this course.

Preparing syllabi is HARD and takes a lot of time and effort.

In order for me to properly design a “Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation” Masters/PhD level course, I:
– went and read (and in some cases, re-read) 31 books.
– emailed two professor friends who shared their syllabi with me.
– downloaded and read 15 different syllabi.

I invested more than 60 hours of my life JUST thinking through which readings and in which order, and which activities I was going to implement. Obviously, it also took me a few hours (4-6) to write the actual syllabus.

What did I learn, after all this?

Well, this will be no news to qualitative researchers, but IT’S FREAKING HARD TO DESIGN A QUALITATIVE METHODS SYLLABUS. There are so many different ways in which I could slice and dice this course. I could craft a 3 semesters sequence (basic, intermediate, advanced).

I could teach a 3-semesters-long sequence on ethnography alone. And that would *just* scratch the surface. I have considered teaching “Foundations of Ethnography”, “Intermediate Ethnography” and “Advanced Topics in Ethnography” and I still have a lot more books to assign than I could cover in any course.

I’ve read 32 books JUST on fieldwork, JUST to think through the mere idea of how to teach students how to enter the field, how to collect data, how to protect themselves.

My point: EVERY course on qualitative methods is bound to miss stuff. You can teach “the mere basics”, a survey, that then gives students the opportunity to develop a specific analytic technique, epistemological and ontological approach. But no course is going to cover EVERYTHING.

In my view, it’s a good idea to teach AT LEAST ONE COURSE in qualitative methods, but we need to be keenly aware and cognizant that there will be gaps that we haven’t filled and that there are new developments that won’t show up in our syllabi on time.

That’s ok too.

Whatever you teach, make sure you include rigorous and well-crafted exemplars that your students and you can deconstruct in class and learn from. That’s one key lesson that I have learned after teaching undergraduate, Masters and PhD-level courses.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 4, 2021

A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies (my reading notes)

A good friend of mine (Dr. Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Université Grenoble Alpes) recommended two books and my website for anyone starting graduate school (Dr. Houssay-Holzschuch is a human geographer). Since I’m half human geographer half political scientist, I immediately decided to follow her advice and buy the two books she recommended. One of them was “A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies” by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis. Actually, Dr. Houssay-Holzschuch recommended this book in another set of tweets that I can’t find right now. At any rate, these two tweets summarize my very positive evaluation of this book.

I have to say that one of the key reasons why this book is so appealing, in addition to the ones I mention above, is that it is published by a small, independent publisher. This alone made me excited about promoting the book.

DISCLOSURE: I bought this book with my own hard earned money. I get no royalties, kickbacks or benefits from writing about it. I do think it’s an excellent book.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 20, 2021