Qualitative research advice

[Tiredoldhag]

Is there anyone here who can offer advice on media analysis? I just need an "how to" explanation. Supervisor not allocated and Lit review due soon after Christmas. Very stressed.

I'm a qualitative researcher. What do you mean by "media analysis"? Do you have data to analyse? What is that data?

I don't think "media analysis" is a method in itself but, rather, you'd apply a qualitative analysis method (content, thematic, discourse, narrative etc.) to a set of media data (e.g. newspaper articles, Tweets). Is that what you're doing?

Bigger question though, what do you mean you don't have a supervisor allocated? Are you a PhD student? How long have you been without a supervisor? To whom is the Lit Review due if you don't have a supervisor?

You need to raise this with your HoD or Director of Grad Studies. You clearly need support and the University has an obligation to provide you with a supervisor to support you. You need to tell HoD/Grad Studies Director that you're struggling without a supervisor and see what they say.

Is this for your undergraduate dissertation?

Thank you both. It is for a MSc dissertation. Yes Game, you are correct, I need to be more specific, however, I am undecided on which method to use as my knowledge is limited and feel I need advice on which is best for my work. I want to extract meaning if that makes sense, and purpose of the way the stories are framed from differing papers. I would like to avoid coding or any other quant process of counting the results. I am more interested in what has been said, why, etc. Is there a method that would cover this? I wondered about narrative analysis.

Perhaps critical discourse analysis?

Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis might be helpful as he goes into analysis of media.

James Paul Gee also could be helpful with discourse vs Discourse.

Look up Helen Kara - very active on twitter - re creative analysis methodologies incl media, visual text, etc.

Some good sources suggested here. But I would also take the lack of supervisor up with your department. They're leaving themselves open to all sorts of issues - if you didn't get a very good mark you'd most definitely have grounds for a complaint because of poor supervision. They're not upholding their end of the contract by not providing you with a supervisor.

Have a look at your programme/degree regulations (where it should say that you will have a supervisor provided) and see what the wording is. Then book a meeting with your course director and tell them you're unhappy with the lack of supervision. Tell her/him that it's affecting the quality of your work, it's getting you down and you don't feel the department is keeping its end of the bargain even though you're paying your fees.

If this were in my department, you'd be assigned a very good supervisor as quick as a flash.

Did you mean meta analysis? You can look that up.

Depending on your subject and the published research, you should get a feel from the articles about ways to compare and synthesise data.

Why on earth don't you have access to a supervisor so near your submission date? You could reasonably discuss an extension on those grounds.