The research experience of postgraduate students: a mixed-methods study

ABSTRACT

Research experience is widely used in quality assurance exercises to benchmark postgraduate education at the institutional level. However, individual differences in students’ research experience have been largely neglected. Furthermore, little is known about how differences in students’ research experience are associated with skill development and overall satisfaction. This study addressed these gaps using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Study 1 was a quantitative study that involved surveying 590 research postgraduate students (i.e. 421 PhD and 168 MPhil students). A person-centered approach, specifically latent profile analysis, was used to analyze the data. Our findings revealed that students could be divided into three groups based on their research experience: rewarding, ordinary, and unsatisfactory. Those with a rewarding research experience experienced greater development in their skills and higher levels of satisfaction, while those in the unsatisfactory group demonstrated the worst outcomes. Study 2 was a qualitative study that involved interviews with 10 PhD students. The qualitative findings largely triangulated the quantitative results but also uncovered emerging themes, including the importance of student-supervisor misfit, publication pressure, and the COVID-19 pandemic context. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Research postgraduate students
• research experience
• latent profile analysis
• skill development
• overall satisfaction

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Higher education in Hong Kong is rooted in both the British colonial heritage and traditional Confucian culture (Postiglione and Jung 2017). On the one hand, the academic culture is influenced by the British higher education system, which highlights a more collegial relationship between supervisors and students and the supervisor-student relationship is characterized by mutual respect. On the other hand, the traditional Confucian culture emphasizes hierarchy and power distance between the supervisor and the student. Although most postgraduate students in this sample university are from the Chinese context and influenced by traditional Confucian culture, the university has very strong British roots. At an institutional level, the university encourages free interaction and exchange between supervisors and students with no duress, harassment and conflict of interest. Meanwhile, most academic staff in this university were from or educated in Western countries (e.g. the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US).