Where am I in my EdD journey?

I know it’s been a while since I wrote about my doctoral journey. In this post I’ll summarise where I’m at so far… Previous posts on this can be found here.

Data collection & analysis

I completed my data collection in the summer of 2023. This included four focus groups, six psychometric testing questionnaires (three each for two year groups) with just under 500 participants, and five semi-structured interviews with teaching staff.

Since then, I have been learning to code in R to conduct descriptive and inferential statistical analysis for the psychometric tests, and I have been (slowly) making my way through the qualitative analysis of the focus groups.

I’ve really enjoyed using R and slowly building my statistical knowledge programming skills; this has been really satisfying. I chose to use R rather than SPSS (or something else) because it seems that progressively more education researchers are using R (anecdotal), but this will also hopefully help open up further opportunities in data-based careers more generally.

I’ve enjoyed the qualitative analysis less. This has been a slow process. For each focus group transcript, I coded (categorised) each statement according to a self-determination theory framework, and based on reference to the use of target grades. Following this, I grouped the statements in each code together to create sub-codes. Most recently, I have been writing some very basic analytical comments on each sub-code, since it helps me distill what each sub-code means and hopefully will also help with the writing stage. I have three more sets of sub-codes to write comments on, and then this will be ‘done’.

Coming up next in data analysis

The next task I’ve set myself is to continue with the statistical analysis, and write up the findings from this. Then, I’ll continue with the qualitative analysis, looking at how codes and sub-codes relate to each other across the different focus groups.

Writing

So far, I have written elements of the literature review, methods chapter, and some key points from early findings from the earlier-completed analysis. The word count currently stands just over 13k words (though a lot of it is in bullet points or notes form!)

Coming up next in writing

This month (August 2024) I’m planning to finish the writing of my methods chapter, and make a good dent in the findings chapter.