Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/10/2025 - 08/10/2025 10:00 am - 12:30 pm
Audience:
NARTI Training & Development
‘Writing Up a Qualitative PhD Masterclass’
With Professor David Silverman
6-8th October 2025
10.00-12.30 all days
Online via Zoom
Summary:
Whether you are doing a traditional PhD or a PhD by publication, ‘writing up’ should never be something left to the end of your research. Instead, writing should be a continuous process, learning from your supervisor, your peers and your own mistakes. I examine how this writing up can be accomplished efficiently if rarely painlessly.
This masterclass is taught via lectures, small group workshops followed by feedback sessions and one-to-ones with all participants. Whether you are just starting a research degree or in your final year, this is the course for you. Among the topics covered are:
- The PhD as an apprenticeship. What ‘originality’ means.
- Learning from your supervisor and your peer groups
- The need for consistency. Fitting your research question and methodology to your research model.
- Reassurance strategies when difficulties arise: the low bar in qualitative research.
- Designing a methodology that allows for rapid data gathering and early data analysis.
- Practical suggestions about when to write a literature review and what it should contain.
- How to avoid dull methodology chapters. Keeping a research diary.
- How to write credible and interesting data chapters. What to include and what to omit.
- Concluding chapters that are not summaries but which stretch the imagination.
Course Content:
This masterclass offers lectures and data workshops covering the latest approaches to key areas of qualitative research:
- Do’s and don’ts in writing a qualitative PhD
- Reader-friendly literature reviews, methodology sections and conclusions. What counts as originality.
- Persuasive data chapters
The workshop will consist of lectures and Q&A.
Advance Reading:
Please use the following link, to take a look at a PhD by one of David’s students, Geraldine Leydon. She is now Professor of Medical Sociology at Southampton University Medical School. Browsing through her thesis will give you a good idea about how to write up a successful PhD: https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4652250/
Schedule:
Monday October 6
10.00 Introductory lecture: The PhD as an apprenticeship: do’s and don’ts in doing a qualitative PhD
10.30 Q&A
10.50 short break
11.00 Fitting your methodology to your research model: the need for consistency
12.00 Q&A
12.30 Day ends
Tuesday October 7
10.00 Effective literature reviews and methodology sections
10.50 Q&A
11.05 short break
11.15 Persuasive data chapters and concluding chapters
12.15 Q&A
12.30 Day ends
Wednesday October 8
10.00 Lecture: publishing journal articles
11.00 Q&A
11.15 Short break
11.30 Student queries about their own research topics and methodologies
12.30 Close
If you are able to fully commit to attending and participating in the masterclass, please register via the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/Y7SmAGSgFB
Biography:
Prof David Silverman is Visiting Emeritus Professor at Leeds Business School, Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, London Visiting Professor in the King’s College Business School, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney as well as Adjunct Professor at QUT, Faculty of Education. He has authored 15 books and over 50 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis. Thirty of his students have successfully completed their PhD and three are now full Professors.
His bestselling textbook Doing Qualitative Research [now in its 6th edition] is a manual for writing a qualitative PhD. Uniquely, it is based on conversations he has had with hundreds of social science research students in five continents.