IPA Training Workshop FAQs

Booking and payment

I have booked and have received my payment receipt but no email with workshop meeting links or information – what should I do?

If you receive your receipt but no other email from elena@doctorelenagr.com with your workshop details and meeting link, it may be that:

#1: You have failed to confirm your subscription to the mailing list on signing up before

Please check your spam/junk folder or the Promotions tab in Gmail to see if your mailing list confirmation email can be found there and confirm asap by clicking on the link in the email

I operate with a double opt-in for email as good practice for GDPR and EU privacy laws. Without confirming your subscription to my mailing list, my email service provider (ESP: MailerLite, which sends all automated emails) is not able to send you any communication!

If confirming your subscription does not trigger your workshop confirmation email with meeting link within about an hour or so, then please contact support@doctorelenagr.com

If you cannot find your ‘confirm my subscription’ email, please contact support@doctorelenagr.com

#2: It has gone straight into your spam/junk folder or your Promotions tab for Gmail. Please check these locations first and mark me as ‘not spam’ if it is in there or drag the email into your Primary tab for Gmail. Whitelist my email address by adding me to your contacts list or address book and/or marking me as a ‘safe sender’ so that my emails always land in your inbox. If there is no sign of your email with workshop meeting link in spam/junk/promotions/quarantine, then please email support@doctorelenagr.com and I can help you

Whitelisting emails from elena@doctorelenagr.com

If you have a Gmail account, please drag any of my emails from the Promotions tab across to your Primary tab and this will whitelist my email address, ensuring that my emails always land in your Primary inbox

For other email accounts, please add my address to your contacts list or address book and/or your ‘safe sender’ list so that my emails do not go into spam

If you have signed up using a university or institutional email address

Please be aware that these are notoriously twitchy about communication from commercial ESPs and will tend to send my automated emails straight into spam/junk. Please add me to your contacts list or address book and/or your ‘safe sender’ list to avoid your workshop emails going astray!

I am not sure if your IPA workshops are suitable for me or if this is the right time to take a workshop. Can you advise me on this?

I would love to be able to provide a quick and easy answer to this frequent query from students, however, it is nigh on impossible for me to advise on suitability of workshops for individual students as I do not know you and I am not familiar with the details of your research study.

Of course, I would love everyone visiting my website to buy some workshops, but I’m very reluctant to encourage any of you blindly without knowing you or your research study circumstances in case it isn’t the right decision for you.

Feedback on my workshops is overwhelmingly positive, but, if there is a niggle, it tends to consistently relate to a mismatch in the suitability of workshops for students and/or the timing of when workshops are taken.

However, students need to take responsibility for their decision to purchase a workshop place as I cannot hope to comment or help anyone decide on suitability or timing as I am not familiar with your circumstances until I meet you. I would prefer not to put myself in the position of giving inadvertently incorrect advice/guidance and I therefore encourage students to make their own decisions and take responsibility for these in terms of the suitability and timing of workshops.

I have provided comprehensive information on the content of workshops on the workshop page of this website. Please read this in detail and don’t forget to check the drop downs of workshop aims and learning outcomes – this may help guide you as to suitability.

Finally, please consider that each workshop is SIX hours in length, giving an indication of the level of detail and depth that we go into for each IPA process that we cover (SSI, situating your study, data analysis, and writing up your analysis).

Please reflect on the timing of when you take your workshop(s) as, for example, it may not be useful to do a lengthy and in-depth practical workshop on data analysis if you are only just in the early stages of planning your project.

This is not rocket science, but you would be surprised…

Finally, I have provided all dates for 2023 on the workshop dates page so that you can plan ahead and consider your optimal timings for this year’s workshops.

I do hope this makes sense and explains why I have the suitability of workshops disclaimer on my website.

Who can I ask about the suitability of your IPA workshops or the timing for me?

The people best placed to advise or guide you regarding workshop suitability and/or timing are obviously your research supervisors.

They will be in a much better position to advise you or help you come to a decision regarding your investment in the workshops. Please direct them to the information on the workshop page and discuss your concerns with them.

You could also ask other students that have taken my workshops – they are probably the best people to seek advice from! I have also included plenty of testimonials on my website to help with this.

Final words on suitability and timing queries:

You need to make any decision to purchase a workshop yourself, and take responsibility for this, especially regarding the suitability or timing of your workshop.

I urge you to take appropriate supervisory advice if you are in any doubt as to the suitability of the workshops or whether it is the right time for you to take a workshop in terms of where you are in your research process.

I have done my best to provide enough information and cautionary guidance to help you make these decisions. Ultimately, it is up to you to take responsibility for your purchase and whether it is the right workshop for you at the right time for you.

The workshop I wanted to attend is full – can you make an exception and let me book on?

Regretfully, I cannot make exceptions and book extra participants on workshops once they are full. Workshop numbers are kept deliberately small so that I can manage the Zoom room and to allow sufficient time for individual attention and Q&A. As such, I need to maintain this boundary firmly as it would be impossible to operate fairly or know where to draw the line if I start making exceptions

Please remember that workshops are repeated every eight to ten weeks and you get priority booking time if you join the mailing list. I always open booking to my list one week ahead of going public on the IPA discussion forum or other social media etc. I do find that the data analysis workshops tend to fill up during priority booking to my mailing list and I advise prompt booking and payment to secure your place and avoid any disappointment

I can’t get onto the workshop I want to attend this time around – can I just buy the recording?

Unfortunately, I cannot sell recordings of workshops for a couple of reasons: one is due to privacy, as recordings include participants and their questions/discussion, etc and this generates all sorts of issues around GDPR legislation. Secondly, there are rather tedious tax reasons (VAT to be precise), as solely digital products with no live input are subject to VAT in the UK (who knew?!). As a one-woman band, running my small business solo, unfortunately, this is a can of worms I do not wish to open!

Please remember that workshops are repeated every eight to ten weeks and you get priority booking time if you join the mailing list. I always open booking to my list one week ahead of going public on the IPA discussion forum or other social media etc. I do find that the data analysis workshops tend to fill up during priority booking to my mailing list and I advise prompt booking and payment to secure your place and avoid any disappointment

I want to get my institution to pay for my workshop – can I do this?

Your institution can pay for your workshop via the online booking process if this is who will be funding your session. Please do note, however, that University/HE institutional payments can be problematic due to the time it often takes for them to be processed by the institution, and my advice to you is to plan well ahead if you wish your institution to make payment for your workshop in order to allow sufficient time for this process to be completed

Please also note that I am unable to respond to administrative requests relating to institutional payments such as providing invoices

You will receive an invoice/receipt for payment via email from the payment processor (ThriveCart) at the point of making payment for your workshop

How does it work if a university administrator is buying my workshop place for me?

This can work in two ways:

#1: your university administrator books your place and uses YOUR email address in the shopping cart, and you will receive the payment receipt and all your workshop confirmation and information emails (don’t forget to whitelist my email address so that these emails land in your inbox!)

#2: your university administrator books the place using their own email address so that they receive the payment receipt. In this case, they MUST email support@doctorelenagr.com to inform me of the correct email address for all relevant workshop emails. I will then exchange their email address for your email address on my systems so that you then receive all your workshop confirmation and information emails. If they do not do this, I have no way of knowing that the emails are going to the wrong person!

This probably sounds crazy, but I have had some students and administrators neglect to tell me to exchange email details on bookings and a whole lot of confusion has ensued – please do not let that be you!

Can I get a discount?

Unfortunately, I am unable to offer discounted booking as I am a private venture, recently started up, and operating outside the University sector. Most of my customers are students and I have priced my IPA workshops at the best value I can. I feel that the cost is competitive with other IPA workshops being offered online and around the country. I have received extremely positive feedback on price so far and participants have overwhelmingly reported that it was good value for money given the breadth and depth of material covered and the resources provided to support you after the workshop. I feel that my workshops offer excellent value for money, and I very much hope that you will too

Do you have a payment plan available?

Unfortunately, I do not currently have a payment plan available

Replays

Why can’t I download my replay?

Replays are available to view as many times as you choose for 75 days once you have been sent the link to view. They are therefore not available for download

I strongly advise carving out the time to rewatch within your 75-day replay window, watching and/or taking notes in conjunction with the slide handout so that you have something to refer back to later

For a typical five-hour workshop recording (the recording is paused during breaks), this amounts to around 30 minutes of replay time per week for a single repeat view of one workshop recording in your 75-day replay window

I do ask that you respect my copyright and do not share your replay link with students that have not attended the workshop

Can I get an extension on my replay beyond the 75 days?

I am unable to grant access to replays for longer than 75 days. Once the replay window has expired, the recordings are deleted and therefore removed from the viewing platform. I do not keep workshop recordings ad infinitum due to their large file size and issues with storage and GDPR. I do hope you can understand the reasoning behind this and make the time to make the most of your replay for the 75 days it is available to you

The timing of workshop delivery

I live in a country where the time difference means that I would be up half the night to attend your IPA workshops – are you going to deliver any at an earlier time?

The timing of workshops at present is to service the majority of participants who are mostly tuning in from Europe and USA/Canada. As such, the afternoon delivery (BST/GMT) services the bulk of my clients

I have had students from Asia (including Singapore, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India and Hong Kong), Australia and NZ attending workshops, so the timing currently does not discourage some students from very different time zones from attending, despite the late finish for them

I do not currently have plans to deliver workshops in the morning (BST/GMT), however, I will consider this as an option going forward

Citing workshop material

Can I cite your workshops in my thesis write-up?

The answer to this question is a straightforward no, I’m afraid. I do not recommend that you do this as the workshops are effectively a secondary reference, where you should be identifying and citing the primary reference in the published IPA/qualitative literature, particularly at postgraduate level of study.

Secondary references lack sufficient academic weight to be employed to support the academic claims or arguments that you make or to support the rationale for any research decision you have made and are justifying in your write-up.

If you think about it, it is academic convention to cite the published literature in order to lend academic weight and credibility to the claims we are making about our research. The process of citing the published (and thus publicly available) literature is also to justify or rationalise our research decisions to knowledge/academic convention that has been peer-reviewed through the publication process. This is generally accepted in academia to lend ‘academic credibility’ as it has been ‘proven’ to have achieved certain standards of ‘quality’ through the process of peer review (NOTE: we could debate this point, but this is not the place to get into such controversies as I could go on for hours!). This conventionally gives academic weight to the source we are referring to and thus to the point/justification we are making.

If you cite the workshop, your reader/examiner has no way of verifying the credibility of that information/rationale (unless they had attended the workshop themselves, I guess, but this is highly unlikely). As such, citing workshops or lectures is not good academic practice and should be avoided. The exception here might be conference proceedings, as these tend to be written up in the literature (i.e., journals) and are more formally recognised in the hierarchy of evidence for research practice.

Perhaps it is useful to weigh up whether you would consider citing one of your university lectures to support a point in your thesis? I suspect this is highly unlikely, and the workshops should be treated similarly as they are effectively secondary references where you are strongly advised to identify and cite the primary reference, particularly at postgraduate level of study.

So, in conclusion, cite the workshops at your academic peril! In my humble opinion, having been a supervisor and examiner for many years, what you need to do instead is search the literature to find the supporting reference for the point you are making to give it the accepted and conventional academic credibility it requires. You have the references that I have drawn upon for each workshop listed at the start of your slide handout. Return to these, find the point you want to make, and cite that to meet accepted academic conventions for evidencing any claims that you make.