Writes of passage: writing up qualitative data as a threshold concept in doctoral research

Abstract

Effective writing is an essential skill for all doctoral students, yet it is one that receives relatively little attention in training and supervision. This article explores extensive feedback from participants in a series of workshops for doctoral candidates engaged with writing up qualitative data. The themes arising from the data analysis are discussed in terms of the affective domain of writing, and the main claim is that writing up qualitative data has been identified as what Meyer and Land would call a threshold concept for doctoral candidates employing qualitative analysis. Drawing on Turner's notion of liminality, the article concludes that interdisciplinary workshops can be instrumental in helping doctoral candidates understand the role of writing, and of writing up qualitative data in particular, in their development into independent, autonomous researchers.

Keywords:

• doctoral education
• writing groups
• qualitative research methods
• threshold concepts
• interdisciplinary study programme

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the participants in the WAB workshops, both for their participation and for the time they gave us in providing the feedback which gave us both the data and the inspiration for this article. We would also like to thank their supervisors, who initially nominated them for a place on the workshops and then allowed us to interview them over the phone six months later. We are indebted to Carolyn McAlhone and Clare Hardy, from the Graduate School at Durham University, for magnificent administrative help with the workshops over the years. We thank, and acknowledge the work of, the doctoral students who helped with the workshops and data processing, Victoria Wood, Mwenza Blell, Alison Jobe, Sally Atkinson and Rachel Douglas Jones, and acknowledge with thanks the help with NVivo given by Dr Jane Wilcockson, and the insightful advice given by Dr Stan Taylor, Director of the Centre for Research and Academic Practice at Durham University, regarding an early draft of this article.

Notes

1. The Writing across Boundaries project was funded by the ESRC Research Development Initiative, grant number RES 035 25 0013. Further details of the RDI can be found at: http://www.rdi.ac.uk/

2. Further elaboration and reflections on the content of the workshops can be found in earlier publications (Simpson and Humphrey 2008, 2010).

3. The project website can be found at http://www.dur.ac.uk/writingacrossboundaries/. Since its inception in June 2008, according to Google Analytics the 211 pages have been viewed 70,941 times, and its home page has recorded 13,026 unique page views, of which 7,049 have originated from outside the UK.