Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega
@raulpacheco
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Professor @FlacsoMx, water, waste, public policy, environmental politics, mixed/experimental methods #ScholarSunday founder. Coffee lover. SNI 2 @iheal_creda VP
Vancouver/Aguascalientes/Paris
Joined July 2008
Improving your academic writing: My top 10 tips http://t.co/HPLfRgamWq for #GetYourManuscriptOut #PhDChat #ECRChat #Acwri folks.
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“Your paper is too readable, which gives me the impression that you’re writing for a general audience rather than an academic one”. Ok then.
What’s the most memorable feedback you’ve received on your work?.
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Qualitative methods, mixed methods, quantitative methods.
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Please be gentle with thesis writers, all y'all.
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I am looking for this meme but I can’t find the name of the turtle. What’s their name?
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Qualitative researchers listening to a quantitative researcher discuss their paper.
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Do you guys ever think we made a huge mistake by doing a PhD?
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I’ll be teaching Qualitative Methods at both the Masters and Doctoral levels next year, so I needed my own copy of this book (which I already had in PDF format). #RPVBooks
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I am going to say something that is going to sit badly with a lot of academics in US and European institutions, but I’m tenured and senior and I give zero fucks. I’ve read a lot of recent academic scholarship in English language journals that rehashes things Mexican and LatAm.
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I have a hypothesis about what we are seeing right now: students, faculty, everyone on the planet is exhausted of this pandemic. This absolute exhaustion is yielding poor outcomes on everything: low attendance, missed work, missed deadlines. We are all burnt out, folks.
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A screenshot of the temperature distribution in Mexico should be enough to worry everyone about climatic change but apparently it’s not something top-of-mind for Mexican politicians.
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Research methods (particularly qualitative) folks (or anybody who is syllabusing): here are a few bibliographies I have compiled (some are embedded in blog posts of mine, some I have not had the time to make them into a blog post.
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|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|.| Qualitative analysis IS |.| empirical analysis. |.|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿| . (\__/) ||. (•ㅅ•) ||. / づ.
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REAL TALK: I'm a senior professor and I have had . 1) journal articles desk rejected. 2) articles rejected AFTER at least one if not TWO ROUNDS of Revise-And-Resubmit.3) articles published after FIVE rounds of R&R.4) a reviewer tell me that my writing sucks "as an undergrad's".
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Fellow professors:. we're in the midst of a fucking pandemic. If you're increasing the amount of work your students are doing "to ensure rigour and maintain high standards of quality" I think you're doing it mightily wrong. Priorities have shifted, as has the global order.
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Me, writing that paper I agreed to write in 2023.
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I think we may need to do away with the claim of novelty because you’d need to be multilingual and very broadly read and cultured to be able to claim novelty. And that’s probably why people are going to complex methods: because subject matter novelty is so fraught to be claimed.
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… academics have researched and published in Spanish and Portuguese. These global North scholars portray these findings as new when I read them published in Spanish 20 years ago. My experience isn’t unique. Even on Twitter, I read these accounts quite frequently.
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Tres de mis estudiantes de doctorado están trabajando ya en su documento completo de tesis, por lo que pensé que sería útil un hilo de #RPVTips que compile los hilos que he escrito sobre la escritura de la tesis, en sus distintos elementos. Abro hilo 🧶.
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Dear #AcademicTwitter - as I return to work from a month-long, awful episode of unbearable pain and illness, let me remind you (as I had to remind myself, sadly): YOUR HEALTH SHOULD BE YOUR PRIORITY. No academic accolades are worth your health and your life.
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Academic struggling to write the well-overdue paper they are currently trying to finish. Oil on canvas.
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Universities really should have spaces where one could nap if needed.
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If you teach Qualitative Methods, my syllabus for a combined Masters and PhD-level class on Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation may be of interest . (CC: BY-NC).
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Good morning, #AcademicTwitter. A friendly reminder that your personal worth and your value is not equal to the number of publications you've produced nor the number of words you've generated, nor your H index, nor your publications' journal impact factor. You are not a number.
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In my view, research is about telling a story. With data, with theory, but it's a story in the end. We reveal things. We explain concepts. We make the complex legible. Storytelling is an underrated skill in academic writing and scholarly research.
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Listening to someone who has more of a comment than a question.
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Dear everyone on the academic job market: it’s brutal out there, there’s a systematic attack on higher education and many of us who landed TT jobs are able to recognize much of it was sheer luck, even if combined with hard work (emphasis on sheer luck). Stay strong. 💕.
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The unthinkable has happened: for 9 weeks, I’ve been sick. For 5 of those I’ve struggled to remain alive. And I’ve lost all interest in doing any academic work. My only interest right now is staying alive and improving my health.
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MetGala2024 in research methods. Zendaya as ethnography:
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Every time you teach someone to avoid writing in the first person, a unicorn dies. Save the unicorns. Stop it with the faux-academic, pseudo-scientific third person.
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Research takes A LOT OF TIME. Time to think. Time to plan. Time to execute fieldwork and/or data collection/cleaning databases.Time to reflect. Time to read. Time to write .Time to take notes. Why aren’t we talking more about this? . Good research can’t be rushed.
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I just reflected on one thing: when we teach on campus we use our university’s own infrastructure. Working remotely forces us to pay for and maintain our own digital infrastructure. Students have to do this too.
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I’ve read most of Hammersley’s work, but this book took me by surprise. The more I teach research design the more intent I am in emphasizing the importance of explanation, causality and relevance. We study things, but why and what for? This book is great #RPVBooks
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Dear academic friends and colleagues: I come bearing important and truthful news about ✍️ writing. #AcWri
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Normalize not looking “perfect” on Zoom. Normalize breaking protocol and having someone from your household come and hug you. Normalize being human while working remotely. Working from home means that we are all uninvited guests. Let’s be ultra polite and chill about it.
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Those who do NOT teach do not even know how much time it takes to:.a) design a class.b) craft a syllabus.c) read all included readings in the syllabus.d) think about diversity in readings.e) think about pedagogical engagement student-instructor.f) consider in-class activities.
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Why is it that developing research questions is so hard for students? . What are we NOT teaching that makes it so difficult for them to craft a well-design research question?. I see this with both qualitative and quantitative research questions.
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My best advice for anyone in academia, be it an undergraduate, a graduate student or a tenured, full professor, is: don’t be an asshole. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
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When people ask me about generalizability in qualitative research.
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Desde el cuatrimestre 1, cuando enseño Diseño de Investigación en el Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales, les enseño a mis estudiantes mi Modelo de las 5 Preguntas. Pero un reto permanente es la contribución. Aquí va un hilo de #RPVTips sobre el método del discurso del ascensor.
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Tengo algunos formatos impresos de mi Modelo de las 5 Preguntas para desarrollar protocolos, resúmenes, artículos, ponencias, y tesis. Siempre que vienen a asesoría mis estudiantes hago que lo llenen para que tengan mayor claridad en lo que están investigando.
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Super hot take: . We should NOT assume graduate students know ANYTHING about research design, research methods, methodology or the mechanics of doing research even if/when they get accepted to a graduate program. That is, don't assume undergraduates know how to do research.
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Having a PhD in economics doesn’t necessarily make you an expert in policy analysis.
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I want to make something perfectly clear, particularly because it looks like people want to jump and "do research", "collect data", "analyse things" and would rather do any of those rather than read. READING IS WRITING. You NEED to read, to be able to situate your work.
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Quantitative methods, qualitative methods, mixed methods:
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#RPVBooks I teach qualitative research design with this book. What I like the most is the fact that Cresswell and Poth focus on research design across multiple paradigms and analytical approaches. Recommended.
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Do you teach Qualitative Methods at the graduate level?. My Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation syllabus is available with CC license A-NC below. Note that this is a combined Masters-PhD-level course (aka it's harder than a pure Masters one): .
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Potentially unpopular opinion: we should stop calling recent PhD graduates “young scholars”. My mom did her PhD very late in life, but she had a full career of research under her belt, even without the PhD. We should also stop with ageist hiring policies - late bloomers exist.
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For anybody doing literature reviews, I have bad news:. YOU NEED TO READ. You can skim as much as you want, use AI-assisted tools, but you ALSO need to read. You can find heuristics and tools to help you be more selective about what you read. BUT. YOU MUST READ. A LOT.
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I think that I have finally found the missing piece linking reading (a lot) with the construction of a literature review. Many students tell me they don’t know how to organize their literature review, how to start it. That is, I believe, because they don’t know what to look for.
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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but here it goes: . Every single successful academic I know has experienced rejection. Behind each paper and book you see published there’s a ton of rejected work. This is a fact of life, and a feature, not a bug, of academia. Stay strong.
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My ex-boyfriend was key in me getting my PhD. He made sure we spent Sundays together, he went to my PhD defense even though he is incredibly shy, he took me for celebratory brunch after I defended. He DOES get a mention in the book I am publishing out of my PhD dissertation.
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but. All writers that I know, seasoned writers (myself included), beginners, mid-career, everyone struggles with their writing. It's challenging to start writing, to continue writing and to complete a piece of writing. Writing is HARD.
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Unpopular opinion: if you teach Methods, you MUST teach how to do:. 1) Research design.2) Data collection.3) Analysis .4) Reporting and writing results.
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Time for an unpopular opinion: footnotes are better than endnotes and yes, this is the hill I am willing to die on. Bibliography at the end and NOT in the footnotes. Citation style: Author Year.
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And herein lies the rub: we can’t individually self-care out of this rut. Somehow we need to engage in global collective action to create conditions that make our lives slower and gentler so we can recover from the global collective grief and loss that we’ve experienced.
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#RPVBooks I’m quite impressed with the Merriam and Tisdell Qualitative Research book. Here’s the thing though: I don’t think any single book is enough to teach qualitative methods. Merriam and Tisdell looks good for someone who has a well defined research question.
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Teaching (and practicing) mixed methods is my passion.
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You're not your job. You're not your degree. You are a full person, with qualities, flaws, promises and premises. You are a work in progress, not a finished product. You're a full human regardless of your job title, your degree or your "productivity/production".
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Being a senior scholar and publicly tearing down a PhD student is an asshole move. No “if”s nor “but”s.
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Writing a Doctoral (PhD) Dissertation – in order to help my own doctoral students, I purchased and read over a dozen books on "how to write a PhD thesis" - here are my reading notes of all of these books #PhDChat
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I use my status as a senior professor to lift scholars up, particularly those at the margins. I'm disappointed in those who use said status to tear junior scholars down. In 2022, make it your goal to lift people up. There are enough people tearing each other down.
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Qualitative research is empirical research – stop equating “empirical” with quantitative
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Expertise costs money. Therefore, it should be paid. It doesn't matter if it took me 30 seconds to solve your problem, it's taken me 30 years of working in the field to be able to solve your problem in 30 seconds.
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Somebody needs to start teaching courses on how to peer-review manuscripts. SERIOUSLY, Jesus. Some of the reviews I get are infuriating.
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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but here it goes:. Sometimes, you just can’t push through that paper or that R&R. Sometimes, manuscripts languish for weeks, months, years. This does not make you a bad researcher. This is normal. It happens. You can, and WILL finish them.
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1. Write daily.2. Make small goals & meet them .3. When you're stuck, keep writing.4. Avoid virtuous procrastination. 5. Make fear an ally.6. Start poor, finish rich.7. Treat revision (and even research) as writing.8. Take this advice!. Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style.
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Folks often ask me "which Qualitative Methods syllabi do you like?". I teach at the PhD level in 3 different specializations: sociology, political science and public policy. So here are 3 syllabi I love from 3 scholars in each discipline:.
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When critiquing a fellow academic, please consider (a) they’re human beings, (b) they may be reading your words, and (c) you may incidentally and inadvertently hurt them, even if you like them and/or are friends with them. Yes, I’m subtweeting you all, folks. Choose to be kind.
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I have 2 big gaps in my CV:. 2003, when my ex-boyfriend broke my heart and I basically quit everything. 2012, when I picked up everything, left my former partner of 8 years in Vancouver and moved to Mexico so I could be close to my parents. Life happens, all y'all.
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Skimming articles using the AIC (Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion) Method, plus an AIC-> Synthetic Note Template for undergraduates (and graduates!) Want to teach your students how to skim articles using my AIC method? This post offers a template.
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Something that I believe a lot of scholars who don't do qualitative methods do not understand seem to understand nor appreciate:. Qualitative research (well done) takes A HELL OF A LOT OF TIME. It's the most time-intensive set of methods I've ever used, by and large.
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You know why I write about mechanics of doing academic research and writing? Because many of my fellow academics ASSUME their students KNOW.
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I will be teaching an Academic Writing workshop today and yet again I will use @JessicaCalarco 's article to showcase how to write a good abstract using the 5 Questions model for crafting abstracts. Article I reference is here:
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I would like to acknowledge that one hardest things about writing is the fact that you need to be emotionally ok to write, and wrestling with those emotions isn't as simple as "just open your laptop and start writing". THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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Few things grate me so much as journals telling me that "in this journal we avoid writing in the first person of the singular because it's unscientific". GTFOOH. *I* did the research. *I* conducted the fieldwork. *I* designed the experiment. *I* deployed the research.
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We can’t “return to normal”. We need to create a new normal where risk assessment and policy choices are not individualized but the result of collective genuine care for one another. We literally need a global transformation. We aren’t “returning to normal” because there isn’t.
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Uno de mis estudiantes de doctorado está por concluir la tesis, así es que aquí va un hilo de hilos de #RPVTips en los que proporciono algunas herramientas para la tesis.
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A full professor now, but I can 100% certify that what kept me motivated was SHEER SPITE. I was going to finish my PhD no matter what because so many people told me they thought I would NEVER finish. Funny enough, now thousands of PhD students read my website to finish theirs.
PhD students, what are some things that kept you motivated to finish as you approached the final stages of the program? The ending is so close yet seems so far 😭.
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I developed a conceptual model that might help us think through the process of creating, planning and executing a research project (whether a dissertation, a thesis, a paper or a journal article or book chapter).
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Me tardé 4 días para escribir mi hilo sobre cómo construir el argumento de una tesis doctoral porque me puse a leer varios libros sobre argumentación, sobre diseño de investigación, y a tomar apuntes, reflexionar, etc. El trabajo intelectual requiere leer y reflexionar.
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I’m going to use this paper to showcase how I highlight, scribble and file my printed materials. I use Sharpie fineliners to write, Stick’n rigid plastic tabs to sort and organize and I’m testing these Faber-Castell highlighters.
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I am teaching Mixed Methods (Masters and PhD levels) this quarter. 2 lectures in, I am 100% convinced that the first lecture in any methods course should be on THE ETHICS OF RESEARCH. Not just "should I write an IRB application?" but "should I even conduct this study at all?".
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