Can hands-on supervision get out of hand? The correlation between directive supervision and doctoral student independence in a Danish study context.

ABSTRACT

Much of the supervision literature revolves around the delicate balance between directive supervision and student independence. Yet there remains a paucity of empirical research about the balancing act. This is the first study based on survey data to undertake a large-scale empirical analysis of the assumed relation between doctoral supervisor direction and student independence. Data were collected from 1,243 doctoral students at a research-intensive Danish University. Factor analysis revealed that directive supervision encompasses two dimensions: (1) controlling and (2) advising. Through regression analysis, we found that student independence is affected positively by advising and negatively by controlling. Interestingly, we also found that student satisfaction was affected positively by both advising and controlling. Our findings suggest that directive supervision is complex, but the benefit of advising supervision could outweigh the harm of controlling supervision. Supervisors should therefore be less concerned with being too hands-on, but more concerned with being too hands-off.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervision
• doctoral study
• independence
• directive
• hands-on
• satisfaction

Acknowledgements

We thank AU PhD and Fund Service for financial support to conduct the study and for the Head of Graduate Schools at Aarhus University for endorsing the whole project.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Aarhus Universitet.