How do doctoral students experience supervision?

ABSTRACT

Supervision has been shown to have a high impact on doctoral students' development. However, little is known about how students perceive not only negative but also positive doctoral experiences, as well as their strategies for dealing with perceived problematic situations. The aim of this study is to analyse and relate doctoral students' significant supervision experiences to the strategies they use to cope with these experiences when they perceive them as challenging or negative. A total of 1173 doctoral students from different research-intensive Spanish universities responded to four open-ended questions about their most significant experiences in their doctoral journey, associated feelings and strategies to deal with them. We identified a total of 223 experiences related to supervision that were distributed into five categories: 1) central prerequisites for supervision, 2) supervisor choice, 3) supervision of the research process, 4) coaching and 5) project management. The results showed three distinct ways, as reported by the students, of handling the perceived negative supervision experiences: 1) no strategy, 2) local strategy and 3) regulatory strategy. The results suggest that analysing both positive and negative experiences may better capture variability in students' supervision experiences. A relation between experiences with supervision and students' satisfaction was also detected.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral journey
• supervision
• doctoral students
• significant experiences
• strategies

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2013-41108-R); and by the National Council of Science and Technology (México) CONACYT (Ref. 216956-477102).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Gabriela González-Ocampo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3623-9841

Montserrat Castelló http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1757-9795

Notes

1 In this study, the category of coaching was defined as including emotional support, shared learning, constructive feedback and promoting motivation, socialisation and agency.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number CSO2013-41108-R]; and by the National Council of Science and Technology (México) CONACYT [grant number Ref. 216956-477102].