Investigating the impact of advisor support on the perceptions of graduate students

ABSTRACT

Support provided by the research advisor is understood to be one of the keys to success in higher-level studies. However, support remains a construct operationalised in many different ways, making it difficult to prescribe those behaviours supervisors should adopt or abandon to optimise support offered to students. This self-report study examines how perceived supportive or unsupportive behaviours relate to students’ wellbeing and attitudes towards their studies as well as dropout intentions. 203 graduate students completed an online survey measuring their perceptions of their advisor's support and several outcome measures. The results show that instrumental support explains a larger part of the variance of the outcomes than affective support. However, micromanagement best explains undesirable states such as negative affect, strain and drop out intentions. The results also suggest that demonstrations of support do not compensate for the negative effects of micromanagement. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Advisor support
• graduate students
• satisfaction
• intention to quit
• wellbeing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The terms ‘advisor’, ‘mentor’, ‘thesis supervisor’, ‘research director’ are used interchangeably to describe the professor assigned to specifically assist and evaluate the student's research thesis.

2 All copies of the questionnaires are available by contacting the first author.

3 As a verification, the three regression factor scores were respectively correlated with the support dimension shown in Table 2. The resulting correlations are all significant and very high (ranging from .80 to .98). This demonstrates that the scores of the original independent variables shown in Table 2 are equivalent with the factor scores used in Table 3. Hence, Table 3 is identical to Table 2, except that Table 3's support dimensions are statistically independent.

4 The slight differences in the R² between Tables 2 and 3 is due to missing data. The factor analysis that yields the factor scores eliminates any subject who fails to respond to at least one item. In this study 16 respondents (of 203) were dropped from the analysis, yielding a final N = 187.