Why qualitative PhD research feels so confusing - and why it's probably not you

Have you noticed that your PhD seems to become more confusing the longer you do it?

The confusion was wholly expected in the early days, because you were a newbie, right? Things are supposed to be a bit foggy then. You get to blunder around for a few months with everyone saying, “Aww, baby PhDer!”.

But months (or even years) in, the confusion hasn't really gone away. You've read a lot of papers - and saved even more in your "To read" folder. But somehow, the more you read, the less certain you feel.

The City Analogy

It's a bit like visiting a city for the first time.

Before you arrive, you look at the map. There's the railway station, the museum you want to visit, the park, a few main roads joining everything together. It all looks wonderfully straightforward.

Then you start walking. Suddenly there are alleyways, shortcuts, roadworks, one-way streets, little cafés tucked down side roads and five different routes to the same destination.

The city didn't become more complicated. You simply started seeing how complicated it always was.

A Tale of Two PhDs

I think qualitative PhD research is rather similar.

One of the biggest reasons qualitative PhD research feels so difficult is because there are actually two PhDs happening at once.

You have the “official” PhD, which includes the obvious stuff like a literature review, a methodology, an ethical approval process, data collection, analysis, writing. This is the one you were expecting, the one you’d more or less prepared yourself for.

Then there’s the “unofficial” PhD, or the Hidden Curriculum as I like to call it. This is where you learn that writing is part of thinking, that there isn't always one right answer, that your supervisor won't always answer your questions directly, and that good qualitative research depends on judgement as much as method.

Once you realise that, a lot of experiences suddenly start to make more sense - like the fact that your supervisor seems to have morphed into some strange being from a fantasy film who answers every question with... another question. Or the fact that writing simply uncovers more questions, or that reading another paper often makes you realise how much more there is to think about.

The Hidden Curriculum

All of this is why intelligent people like you often start questioning themselves - because in order to make progress on their PhD, they need to learn something that's largely invisible.

Yeah, welcome to the part of the PhD that nobody really explains.

The problem is that you're learning two things at once. The first one is how to complete a doctoral research project, the other is how to think like a researcher. Universities are generally much better at teaching the first than the second. Much of the hidden curriculum is picked up gradually through supervision, reading, writing, making mistakes and talking to other researchers.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that many of the questions people ask me aren't really about literature reviews, coding or discussion chapters.

They're about this why qualitative research feels the way it does.

That's why I've written a short book called The Hidden Curriculum of Qualitative PhD Research, and over the next few blogposts, I'll be sharing some of its central ideas with you.

My hope is that soon, you'll look at your PhD rather differently than you do today. I think you'll find it a much kinder way to understand where you are.