Predicting stress and mental wellbeing among doctoral researchers

Abstract

Background

Although mental health in higher education is increasingly recognised as a public health issue, postgraduate research students are often overlooked. Recent studies indicate a high prevalence of mental distress in this population.

Aims

This study assesses the experience of doctoral researchers and identifies factors influencing mental wellbeing and perceived stress.

Methods

A cross-sectional study examined how key demographic, individual and contextual factors related to stress and mental wellbeing in a sample of 431 doctoral researchers in the United Kingdom.

Results

Respondents gave positive reports about their supervisory relationship and identified feeling confidently prepared for their work. Family support, good general health, sleep and low levels of self-depreciation predicted stronger mental wellbeing and lower levels of stress. Students who were confident about their future career and felt well prepared for their studies were less stressed and those who were achievement orientated had better mental wellbeing.

Conclusions

Focused attention on exploring career options and building confidence may help reduce stress among doctoral researchers. Taking steps to tackle the imposter phenomenon may help further. These could include addressing fear of failure, improving confidence in research ability and clarifying the role of doctoral researchers within the wider academic community.

Keywords:

• Mental wellbeing
• postgraduate research
• higher education
• student mental health
• doctoral researchers
• imposter phenomenon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .84. Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (χ2 (231) = 3479.63, p < 0.001). The diagonals of the anti-image correlation matrix were over .5. The extracted communalities were above .2.

2 Our plot of standardised residuals vs. standardised predicted values showed no obvious signs of funnelling for the model predicting perceived stress, suggesting the assumption of homoscedasticity has been met. Analysis of scatter plots indicated that, broadly, the assumption of linearity was met for both models. Analysis of collinearity statistics showed no indicated of multicollinearity, as VIF scores were well below 10 (highest score = 3.05) and tolerance scores above 0.2 (lowest score = .36). Indicating independence of residuals, the Durbin-Watson statistic for both full models fell within the limits of acceptability (predicting perceived stress Durbin-Watson = 1.94; predicting mental wellbeing Durbin-Watson = 1.97). The P-P plot for both models suggested that the values of the residuals were normally distributed. Cook’s Distance values were all under 1, suggesting individual cases were not unduly influencing either model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England under the Catalyst Funding grant.