Doctoral researchers are often urged to blog. Some do and some don’t. While individual doctoral bloggers talk about blogging as a practice, there is very little research on doctoral student blogging.
When we did our small preliminary study of why academics blog, we found many interesting student blogs, but we had to leave them out of that project. After doing some preliminary analysis of these have lots of questions:
- Why do doctoral students start blogging?
- What do they blog about?
- What do they get out of blogging?
- Why do they sometimes stop blogging?
Inger from The Thesis Whisperer and Pat from Patter blog aim to find out the answers to these questions – with your help.
We’ve designed a small online survey which, we hope, doctoral student bloggers might fill in. We are looking for doctoral researchers who blog regularly or occasionally, on their own blog.
The survey is also open to people who blogged during their doctorate and who may now be finished. We are very interested in people who started a blog, but didn’t keep going with it.
The survey could take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on how much information you want to give us.
We will report the results of the survey on our blogs and will also keep you in touch with the paper that we intend to write as a result.
If you know a person who might want to fill in this survey, please feel free to pass this link along.
Thank you!