Doctoral students’ access to non-academic support for mental health

Increased doctoral student numbers has led to a growth in studies dedicated to doctoral experience. These studies have raised a range of mental health concerns around workload, supervision processes and student well-being. Despite these challenges being well documented, few studies have looked at doctoral student’s experiences of accessing non-academic support services. This article presents the findings of a mixed-method study to investigate doctoral experiences of non-academic support, conducted at one British university with a large postgraduate research population. Drawing on focus groups and a student survey, the article concludes that many doctoral students are not accessing institutional support when they could benefit from it, with many turning to external support mechanisms including family, personal doctor and online resources. Five institutional recommendations are proposed to develop improved dedicated doctoral student mental health support: clear signposting, online self-help, workshops, parity of support and supervisor training.     

From ‘Year 9 dropout’ to doctoral candidate: An autoethnographic journey of becoming (with friends)

ABSTRACT

In this article, I am joined by two academic colleagues to explore my personal narratives and experiences as a doctoral student, and to explicate the challenges and achievements of my pathway into doctoral studies. Positioning itself within the growing field of doctoral research, the article focuses on an exploration of three vignettes which identify important points in my unfolding stories of formation in becoming a doctoral student as an older person. This autoethnographic study draws on Transformative Learning Theory and the critical discourse understandings of Gee to examine my stories of becoming from school-leaver at 15 to doctoral student over four decades later. The study has three implications. First, it is important to recognise and appreciate alternate pathways to doctoral education. Second, that there is a need to better understand the complex formation of doctoral students within an academic research community; especially in regard to those from diverse or challenging backgrounds. Finally, the significance of seeing doctoral education as identity work and work of the soul, built as much on affective experiences and reflexivity as learning to perform and write as an academic, is key.     

EXPERIENCE OF RETIREMENT By Robert S. Weiss

A survey was conducted in the 1989‐1990 academic year of 421 American Psychological Association (APA) approved programs offering graduate study at the doctoral level in psychology and associated fields. The purpose was to provide continuing documentation of opportunities for doctoral training in adult development and aging. Results were compared to similar surveys conducted in 1975 and 1984. From 1975‐1984 there was dramatic growth in programs offering specialized training in adult development and aging. For the 1984‐1990 time period, growth proceeded at a much slower rate. Additional survey results indicate that most programs offering specialized training in adult development and aging are located in developmental psychology programs in general psychology departments. In addition, respondents were asked to provide information about opportunities for professional experiences offered doctoral students specializing in adult development and aging. Approximately 50% of programs with specialized doctoral training offer students some combination of teaching, research, or practicum/internship experiences. The need for continued growth in programs offering doctoral students specialized training in adult development and aging is discussed.     

An interpretive study of doctoral mentoring in literacy

This research focused on one mentor and her advisee and how they characterized the mentoring process and their roles in it. The mentor, a seasoned veteran, was independent, self‐motivated, and passionate about her work. The doctoral student, on the other hand, sought the expertise of a more knowledgeable person to help her deal with, and reduce, her stress. Clearly, both individuals saw reciprocity in their relationship. The faculty mentor perceived the doctoral student as someone who could lend another set of eyes to her work; the student viewed herself in the role of expanding the mentor's research interests. The faculty member saw mentoring as a concrete, sequential process, ultimately leading to independence as a scholar. The doctoral student expressed a combination of anxiety and eventual comfort, viewing the range of research experiences as an opportunity to explore options.     

Deconstructing Doctoral Students’ Socialization from an Institutional Logics Perspective: A Qualitative Study of the Socialization of Chinese Doctoral Students in Finland

While socialization has become a major lens of research in doctoral education, this paper advances the theoretical foundation of the socialization process in doctoral education by using the institutional logics theory. Specifically, it proposes an analytical framework for understanding the socialization of doctoral students, where it is seen as a process of reconciling different or even competing institutional logics that drive students’ development in doctoral education. The framework has been applied in an empirical study of ten doctoral students in Finland who were funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). While proving the usefulness of the analytical framework, the study shows that CSC doctoral students mainly face the competing logics of profession and corporation during socialization. Influenced by a strong profession logic, the Chinese students have transformed themselves into novice professionals and knowledge producers. Corporation logic competed with profession logic in the management of doctoral students and has resulted in a lack of teaching experiences in doctoral training and a weak recognition of professional identity in the students’ host universities. The influence of family logic, inherited from CSC doctoral students’ cultural backgrounds, has been decoupled in the socialization process and has led to a strong sense of loss in handling the supervisory relationship between supervisors and students. Based on the findings of this study, the author provides several recommendations for host universities, supervisors, doctoral students, the CSC, and the Chinese Embassy in Finland to enable them to work together and help CSC doctoral students tackle the aforementioned challenges.     

“What’s the Middle Ground? Am I Ever Going to be the Perfect Teacher?:” Self-Study of a Doctoral Student’s Acculturation Process

In higher education, doctoral training has been identified as a process of stewardship development whereby individuals learn the knowledge and skills required to advance their respective disciplines. Self-study of teacher education practices is one approach that has gained the interest of doctoral students to help them understand their own development whilst also forging recommendations for others in publications. In this self-study, we worked to understand the experiences of Shrehan, a teacher from England beginning doctoral study in the USA. Shrehan had no experience teaching at the college level prior to moving to the USA, and she saw self-study as an opportunity to understand her development and acculturation into an unfamiliar system of higher education. Data were collected through journaling, critical-friend discussions, and artefacts, as well as student data in the form of surveys, exit slips, and focus-group interviews. Qualitative data analysis of Shrehan’s experiences was guided by the four stages of acculturation theory – honeymoon, culture shock, adjustment, and recovery. Shrehan’s journey emphasizes the importance of getting to know undergraduate students and building rapport as key aspects of teaching at the college level. Self-study provided Shrehan with a heightened personal-identity awareness that increased her cultural sensitivity and broadened her worldview. Results are discussed with reference to acculturation theory and future directions for research are provided.     

Ongoing Doctoral Study Process to Live by: A Narrative Inquiry into the Doctoral Identity Construction Experiences—A Chinese Case

The study employs a narrative inquiry approach to probe a Chinese doctoral student’s identity construction experiences fraught with interruption and transformation. The longitudinal narratives gathered through participant entries in Evernote, a face-to-face life story interview, and researcher memos, have enabled a dynamic configuration of the intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions characterizing doctoral identity development. Using identity-trajectory as an analytical lens, the study highlights how individual agency is embodied and exercised in institutional, relational, and personal spaces where doctoral identity is formed and contested. Findings are episodically ordered as: beginning doctoral study with great expectations; conceptualizing the nature of becoming a doctoral student; forces that are disruptive to the development of the doctoral-researcher identity; the ongoing process of being mediated by socialization into an extended research community, socio- professional support, and agentic reflexivity over time. The study argues for using narrative inquiry to speak of and express the subtleties and continuities of doctoral students’ experiences. It also provides practical implications for action by supervisors and students in doctoral programs respectively.     

‘Tough love and tears’: learning doctoral writing in the sciences

Contemporary changes to the doctorate mean student researchers are likely to be expected to write differently, write more and more often, and yet, despite a growing interest in doctoral education, we still know relatively little about the teaching and learning practices of students and supervisors vis-a-vis doctoral writing. This paper draws from a research study into the writing experiences of higher degree students and their supervisors in one science, health and technology-based university Faculty. The study used surveys, interviews and focus groups to collect information from students and supervisors about their experiences of doctoral writing and their perceptions about its development. By attending to the writing-related pedagogical practices of supervisors, this article explores how doctoral writing can be the stage for the playing out of tensions over changing roles and identities aggravated by contemporary pressures on doctoral education.     

培养高质量博士生的实践逻辑——基于全国百篇优博论文获得者对博士阶段的回溯评价

博士生教育作为学历教育中最顶端的层次,其培养的质量一直受到社会的广泛关注。博士生培养质量是通过终端的统计指标来体现的,而影响这些指标高低的关键因素贯穿在博士生培养的过程之中,只有回溯博士生的培养过程,才能发现培养高质量博士生的实践逻辑。通过对10位全国优秀博士学位论文获得者的质性访谈,‘再现了高质量博士生的培养全过程,所在学科领域的成熟程度、个人教育背景与研究方向的契合度、师生相处过程中的匹配度三个因素直接影响博士生培养质量,“正视起点、注重过程、因材施教”的培养路径是高质量博士生培养过程中需要共同遵循的实践逻辑。     

The Cohort Leadership Development Model: Student Perspectives

This study examined how graduate students enrolled in a university-based cohort community college leadership doctoral program perceived their leadership development experiences. A total of 50 doctoral students enrolled in the Morgan State University (MSU) doctoral program were surveyed. A separate group of students (20) participated in a focus group. Results indicated that although doctoral students generally reported positive experiences, some students reported that certain factors or characteristics and behaviors of cohort members were not beneficial to the cohort experience. The positive results (structure, instructors, networking, and curriculum) of the cohort experience seem to support the findings of a number of works in the previous research relating to cohort learning environments. The findings further indicated that such factors such as dominant group members, lack of commitment to the cohort, failure to meet group expectations, traditional instructional modalities, and inadequate facilities negatively impacted perceptions of the cohort experience.     

A Student Portfolio Approach to Conducting Doctoral Social Work Comprehensive Examinations

ABSTRACT

This report describes using a student portfolio approach to the structure and conduct of doctoral-level comprehensive examinations in the field of social work. Portfolios have been used as the primary method (one exception in over 40 students) to conducting social work comprehensive examinations at the author's former university, and this doctoral program appears to be unique in this regard among North American social work programs. The approach to organizing the written and oral components of comprehensive examinations using a portfolio is described, along with some of the advantages and disadvantages of this technique. Other doctoral programs are encouraged to include this method as one option in evaluating student readiness to conduct dissertation research and attainment of pedagogical objectives.     

Teaching Future Teachers: A Model Workshop for Doctoral Education

Doctoral student training has become focused in recent years on acquiring subject-area knowledge and research skills, rather than on teaching. This shift often leaves aspiring junior faculty feeling unprepared to address the demanding pedagogical requirements of the professoriate. In the area of social work, few programs contain a structured, required program of study that addresses issues unique to teaching in a school of social work. This article outlines a doctoral teaching workshop as a model framework for social work doctoral programs. Suggestions are provided for ways to incorporate such an effort into current social work doctoral education.     

Foreign Language Anxiety among Counseling Students Speaking English as a Second Language: A Rationale for Future Research

Research on foreign language anxiety has focused primarily on students in language training programs. The lack of attention to foreign language anxiety among counseling students speaking English as a second language has led to supervision issues among this growing student population in counseling programs. This article identifies areas such as self-efficacy and microskills that are affected by foreign language anxiety and recommends training strategies and the potential value of qualitative research methods to address the situation.     

International mobility of PhD students since the 1990s and its effect on China: a cross-national analysis

ABSTRACT

Of all the levels of education, doctoral education is the most internationalised. By selecting one key indicator (the proportion of international students among a country’s doctorate recipients), the article presents an analysis of PhD students’ international mobility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, many barriers to the international mobility of PhD students were removed, leading to an even larger flow of students. From 2000 to 2012, the international mobility of PhD students reached a new peak, with a significant increase in the percentage going to Japan, France, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Nowadays, China has become the largest source of international doctoral students. In that process, a number of excellent students go abroad to study for foreign doctoral degrees. On one hand, the loss of excellent students is harmful to China’s PhD training system, but on the other hand, it is a great opportunity for China to change brain drain into brain gain by making full use of the knowledge diaspora scattered around the world.     

Skills versus pedagogy? Doctoral research training in the UK Arts and Humanities

The traditional ‘lone scholar’ view of an Arts and Humanities doctoral student sits uneasily with the skills-based discourse underpinning policies aimed at enhancing researcher development and employability. This paper reports on a case study of a research training programme for doctoral students in the Arts and Humanities at a UK university. It calls for the embedding of the generic skills agenda within a more clearly articulated pedagogic discourse and formulates four pedagogic principles for research training programme design. Additionally, the paper problematises the research trainer role and highlights the importance of paying attention to the students' own learning agendas and the learning value they are prepared to derive from training.     

Doctoral Student Socialization: Educating Stewards of the Physical Education Profession

ABSTRACT

In preparing the future stewards of the physical education profession, the occupational socialization and professional development of physical education doctoral students is important to consider. To date, there has been scant scholarly inquiry into doctoral education in physical education. However, there is an abundance of research related to doctoral training in the higher education literature more generally. Drawing upon this larger body of work, this article expands occupational socialization theory to address the socialization of physical education doctoral students and faculty members. The case is made that effective doctoral training in physical education is essential to securing the future of the profession. Provided is an overview of the existing literature, presentation of an adaptation to occupational socialization theory that explains doctoral physical education socialization, and a discussion of key professional development issues that academic leaders and student support personnel should consider. Implications and recommendations for doctoral physical education leadership and academic programs are provided.     

Completing the Three Stages of Doctoral Education: An Event History Analysis

Doctoral programs have high dropout rates of 43% representing the highest among all post-baccalaureate programs. Cross sectional studies of doctoral students?? retention have showed the importance of financial aid in predicting degree completion. These studies however, do not estimate the labor market??s effect on doctoral student retention and neglect the longitudinal nature of doctoral study and the multiple requirements that make doctoral education a three-stage process. This research study examines the effect of various factors, including financial aid and labor market conditions, on the likelihood that doctoral students will complete the three stages of doctoral education: transition, development, and research. The results show that although financial aid as a whole is important, the type of financial aid received is even more significant and has differential impacts on doctoral students?? retention at each stage. The study concludes that research assistantships have the highest likelihood of degree completion compared to students with other forms of financial support. Labor market conditions are also an important factor affecting doctoral student retention with higher expected earnings motivating doctoral students in the later part of their programs to complete their degrees.     

Exploring the relationship between doctoral students’ experiences and research community positioning

Despite the growing number of studies exploring PhD students’ experiences and their social relationships with other researchers, there is a lack of research on the interaction between the type of experiences and the social agents involved, especially in relation to not only problems and challenges, but also to positive emotions and experiences. In this study, we addressed this gap exploring the relationship between four ecology doctoral students’ most significant experiences and their perceived position in the research community. Additionally, we aimed at exploring the utility of a methodological device with two instruments, Journey Plot and Community Plot. Results showed, in one hand, that both positive and negative experiences were significant in students’ trajectories, but the proportion varied greatly across participants. Supervisors were related to negative experiences, whereas the broader community was mostly source of positive experiences. Research writing and communication experiences were significant in relation to all the social agents, while other contents of experience were restricted to the smallest social layers (e.g. research motives were confined to the individual layer, and research organization to the individual and supervisor layers). Relationships between the type of experiences and participants’ position in the community were found and implications for doctoral education discussed.