STRAWBERRY ANALYSIS WRITING A PAPER-BASED PHD.

Many PhD students write paper-based dissertations. This has several advantages; by dividing the PhD project into smaller pieces you get published early, and also reduce the overall risk of running out of time and funding. However, at one point you will need to write a PhD Summary, which essentially should show that all the pieces fit together into one consistent contribution. This is often more difficult and time consuming than expected, and the PhD student - while now well versed in the chosen research method - is often at loss regarding how to do this. Enter Strawberry Analysis. Building on Carney's Ladder of Analytical Abstraction and Miles & Huberman's data analysis techniques we suggest a framework that guides the PhD student through four steps of analytical abstraction and synthesis, enabling her or him to integrate the contributions of each paper. We illustrate the approach by an example, and discuss the usefulness of the framework. This study should be useful to PhD students writing a paper-based PhD, particularly those who have published a few papers and are in the second half of writing the Summary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]