Saturday, October 27, 2012

Writing

I'm currently writing up my lit review, which is taking longer than I expected. Initially I had planned to conduct a review of the literature as i progressed through the PhD. However we have discussed wring this up as a paper defining why a study of the nature I proposed for my PhD is needed. ie a rational if you like.
One of my issues with this is that there will be more literature as I go and so this can't be one defining document. Marina suggested I publish the table in which I'm synthesising findings in the papers, on a public website so it can be constantly updated. I like this idea.
On a writing retreat this week I showed my writing group the efforts so far and I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the feedback at first. The general opinion was that I shouldn't try and publish this lit review as most journals would not be interested in it as after all who am I to tell the world..? They suggested I keep writing it up but that it becomes a chapter in the Thesis rather than a journal article. That's actually fine and I'll discuss this with my supervisors next week.

So where I am at right now is trying to weave the themes that have come from my searching, with the relevant items from the articles and then craft a suitable reflection/discussion and conclusion.
Themes I'm working with are:

Formative vs. summative evaluation
Building capacity in evaluation skills
Non-completion of project elements (such as evaluation, reports and the project itself)
Non-usage of evaluation findings
Importance of stakeholder involvement
Inaccurate initial expectations (could be linked to #2)
Importance of planning and defining clear evaluation criteria
Evaluation approaches, models or frameworks



1 comment:

  1. need to write more about the methodolgy used - synthesis of the articles and manually extracting themes etc - ref. Krippendorf.

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