Doctorate via peer support -group: what is it and how to organize one
In the fall of 2022, I was facing a dilemma. Come January, I was supposed to start writing the introduction of my article-based dissertation. From my friends and colleagues who had already written theirs, I’d heard it can be a difficult, frustrating process.
This is perhaps not surprising, since an introduction is a specific type of text that differs noticeably from articles, yet resources and guidelines for writing it are somewhat scarce (see e.g., Nikander & Piattoeva 2017). This was the case at my faculty, which did not offer courses on this topic.
To solve this dilemma and to try to make writing the introduction more pleasant, I decided to organize a Doctorate via peer support -group for social science PhD researchers writing their introductions in the spring of 2023.
This idea was based on Elsa Saarikkomäki and Natalia Ollus’s (2018) model on how to write an introduction via peer support. In their very useful article from 2018, they provide a detailed structure of topics to cover and suggest a schedule for doing so. In our group, we took this as our starting point and modified it to fit our needs.
This blog post details this process as well as the practicalities of organizing a peer support group. As such, it’s hopefully helpful for anyone else interested in doing something similar.
Saarikkomäki & Ollus’ topics (my translation):
- Preliminary preparations
- Outline of the table of contents
- Abstract of the whole introduction
- Summaries of the articles
- A summary table of the articles and methods
- Research questions
- Central concepts
- Theory, i.e., everything that comes before the methods-section
- Data and methods
- Arguments of the dissertation
- Conclusions
Groundwork for organizing a peer support group
Who: Figure out who the participants could be and how to reach them. It might also be a good idea to think about the size of the group: will there be a maximum (or minimum) number of participants? In our case, I drafted an invitation to join the group (with a preliminary schedule) and circulated it on the social science doctoral school e-mail list. Later on, our group communicated via shared e-mail thread.
Where: Does your group need a physical location to meet, will it be online (e.g., zoom), or perhaps a hybrid of both? Our group got support from our doctoral program, and this enabled us to reserve a classroom for our meetings at the university. It was also possible to participate via zoom.
When: What will be the schedule of the group? How often will you meet? We had a kick-off meeting where we planned the details of our schedule, agreeing to meet weekly on Friday afternoons.
The group in action
Our meetings lasted between two and three hours, and they followed the same pattern every time. We had one topic per week (except with theory, which we worked on for four weeks).
We started with a shared discussion that lasted about 20-30 minutes. Here, we talked about the topic of the week, how writing had gone (or hadn’t!), feelings, successes and failures, and so forth.
After this, we worked in pairs reading each other’s texts. This was inspired by the skrivarstuga-concept, which basically means that no one has to read anything in advance. Instead, reading-time is scheduled into the meeting and every writer brings their printed text with them. We would use approximately 30 minutes for reading, and then approximately the same time for commenting each other’s papers. We switched pairs from week to week, with the idea that people could give and receive feedback from different viewpoints.
Finally, we would have approximately 15-20 minutes of discussion to close the group. Here, we shared insights, observations, and ideas that came up during the pair-work.
Forging links between the bits and pieces of the PhD project to create a coherent introduction.
So, how did it go?
Overall, I think that our group worked well and was useful to the participants, a feeling that was also expressed by those involved.
Getting together once a week was a good motivator to get writing done during the otherwise quite solitary process of writing an introduction. It was also nice to have a place where we could vent our frustrations and occasionally even despairs, as well as celebrate our achievements and discoveries. One participant mentioned that the group made it possible to realise how difficult the process of writing an introduction was not only for her but for others as well, which put things into perspective and was helpful in building up resistance. In addition, working in a group was a good reminder that there are many ways of going about tasks, even tasks strictly defined like the thesis, and no one way is the right way.
Moreover, since an introduction was a new genre of text for all of us, it was useful to discuss its intricacies together and try to collectively figure out questions concerning, for example, how to formulate research questions and construct arguments for the introduction.
Organizing the reading and commenting based on the skrivarstuga-concept similarly got positive feedback, since it meant that no one had to send their text in advance or dedicate time for reading others’ texts outside of the meetings. This also worked because the idea behind commenting others’ texts was not so much about providing extremely nuanced and in-depth comments, but rather to say something useful for the writer in broad strokes – and to provide a bit of social pressure to help get writing done.
Our schedule was quite tight: A week per topic was in most cases not enough time to finish a section. Still, it did make it possible to have at least some text for all the sections required for an introduction; a basis to keep working on in the future. The weekly deadline could also work as a working deadline.
We ended up modifying Saarikkomäki and Ollus’ list of topics a little: instead of spending a week on a summary table of the articles and methods (topic 5), we added the topic of introduction (of the introduction).
All in all, based on this experience I would warmly recommend a doctorate via peer support group; it made writing the introduction a much more enjoyable process!
Finally, a warm thank you for the Doctoral School in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki for funding our meetings.