Early career researchers making sense of their research experiences: a cross-role and cross-national analysis

ABSTRACT

Early career researchers’ journey (i.e. doctoral researchers and post-PhDs) is increasingly challenging, but little is known about how they live and interpret their significant experiences, that is how they attribute meaning to these experiences and their associated feelings. Moreover, research about how doctoral researchers and post-PhDs deal differently with such experiences remains scarce, especially when accounting for the interpretation of significant experiences across countries. This paper explores how role (doctoral researchers or post-PhDs) and country (Spain, UK and Switzerland) can influence individuals’ interpretation of significant events. It draws on the most significant events reported by 544 early career researchers in two open-ended questions. Analyses revealed differences between roles only regarding the sense-making, especially in the future implications, and across countries in both the sense-making and the associated feelings. This interaction between role and cultural/workplace practices, is the most compelling, especially given the high mobility expected of post-PhDs.

KEYWORDS:

• Early career researchers
• significant events
• sense-making
• feelings
• cross-national

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Profesor asociado’ is an underpaid casual part-time non-tenure track category at Spanish universities that was initially meant for expert professionals working outside academia. Nowadays most early career researchers take this position to start their career in academia even though they do not have a job outside university. Contracts are typically for 3–12 months and involve 3–12 hours/week of teaching and have no research load.

2. The project was based and funded by the Spanish government and mostly focused on doctoral researchers. So, in the overall sample Spanish doctoral researchers were much more numerous than were those in the UK and Switzerland. Thus, for the purpose of comparison, in this study we randomly selected a subsample of approximately 12% of doctoral researchers who completed the free-write significant experiences items of the questionnaire (n = 1135) was selected using the ‘Select cases: Random sample’ feature of SPSS 22.

3. Only statistically significant z values are displayed to make tables easier to interpret.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission under the programmeEuropean Erasmus + Programme the project ‘Researcher Identity Development: Strengthening Science in Society Strategies’ [grant number 2017-1-ES01-KA203-038303] and by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture [grant number 2016- Q24 B3-193871].