Printable table of contents for the International Journal of Doctoral Studies, Volume 10, 2015

This study explores the attitudinal and motivational factors underlying graduate students’ attitudes towards team research. Guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior, we hypothesize that attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control are three major determinants of graduate students’ intentions to conduct team research. An instrument was developed to measure the influences of these f ...

What predicts academic success during graduate school? What are the experiences of graduate students in terms of happiness, stress level, relationships in the program, and feelings of autonomy/competence? Responses from 3,311 graduate students from all psychological disciplines in the US and Canada were collected to answer questions involving (1) the relationship between student-level variables an ...

In many Western countries, higher education has experienced a cultural change as a result of increased budgetary constraints, calls for greater accountability, and the greater competition for students. This development has had a profound influence on the working conditions of academic staff and on knowledge production in general at universities. The education of PhD students is no exception. Howev ...

Gaps between expectations and actual educational experience may influence motivation, learning and performance. The graduate college experience (GCE) is shrouded in myth and legend that may create unrealistic expectations, while its reality includes elements of politics, economics and organizational psychology. This study examined 1,629 present and former graduate students’ perceptions of what the ...

As Internet usage becomes more commonplace, researchers are beginning to explore the use of email interviews. Email interviews have a unique set of tools, advantages, and limitations, and are not meant to be blind reproductions of traditional face-to-face interview techniques. Email interviews should be implemented when: 1) researchers can justify email interviews are useful to a research project; ...

Instruction in research methods, particularly statistical training, is an essential requirement for most higher education advanced-degree students. However, results from the institutional survey reported here demonstrate that many faculty in schools of education still do not require or offer a variety of research and analysis courses to provide this training. This article will explore graduate-lev ...

Doctoral students have often been described as apprentices engaged in workplace learning. Further, assumptions are frequently made in the literature about the common nature of such learning experiences, e.g., in the sciences, research-related practices are learned in a lab within the supervisor’s program and team. A few recent studies of the science doctoral experience have challenged this view ar ...

With doctoral completion rates hovering around 50%, students, faculty and institutions are seeking methods for improvement. This narrative inquiry examined the impact of collaboration and peer to peer experiences on doctoral completion of three peers in a part-time doctoral program. Prior to this inquiry, minimal research existed on the impact of peer to peer support and collaboration on doctoral ...

Grounded theory is a powerful and rigorous theory building methodology that has attracted considerable interest in business research; however, it is a challenging endeavour especially for novice researchers and in particular at the doctoral level. Although several researchers have attempted to clarify the cannons of various grounded theory approaches, still there is a shortage in guidance for doct ...

Increasingly doctoral candidates are attempting to complete a thesis by publication. This format varies between universities but there are common issues particularly in terms of progression, planning and timing. There are both advantages and difficulties involved in undertaking a thesis in this format. Our discussion of the supervisor/candidate partnership is framed within the requirements of a ti ...

There are relentless calls for innovation in higher education programs in response to media and policy-makers attention to such concerns as instructional quality, relevance to employment, costs, and time-to-degree. At the same time, the individual course remains the primary unit of instruction and there is little evidence of faculty development strategies to assist with changing core instructional ...

While researchers, institutional leaders, and policymakers have made significant progress towards increasing undergraduate student diversity in the United States, diversity in graduate education has been less often studied and a more challenging goal on which to make progress. This qualitative study explores the roles and work of graduate diversity officers (GDOs) in student recruitment activitie ...

PhD trajectories are important to universities, as these contribute to the increase in knowledge and output. Therefore, they aim to decrease the completion time and dropout. This article reports on our survey amongst PhD candidates and supervisors of the Graduate School CAPHRI, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. We investigated interpersonal aspects of coaching and (implicit) assumptions on ...

Drawing on developmental networks theory, this qualitative research study explores the professional preparation and career decision-making processes of doctoral students in the sciences. The study is based on 95 semi-structured interviews with informants at three research universities in the United States. Though many students were interested in non-academic career tracks, they were largely unawa ...

The emerging body of research on business professional doctoral programs has focused primarily on the programs’ composition and management, offering limited insight into students’ motivations and the impact the degree has on graduates and their careers. However, understanding these student motivations and career impacts is valuable for several reasons. In addition to helping future candidates asse ...

Response rates to the academic surveys used in quantitative research are decreasing and have been for several decades among both individuals and organizations. Given this trend, providing doctoral students an opportunity to complete their dissertations in a timely and cost effective manner may necessitate identifying more innovative and relevant ways to collect data while maintaining appropriate ...

This study examines the ways that part-time Ph.D. students develop community within the academic department and how a sense of community is related to persistence. This study included 12 participants (ten students and two program chairs) in two academic departments at one urban research institution. This qualitative study followed a descriptive case study design and provided three levels of data: ...

The study explored features of an educational doctoral program that enhances doctoral student success. Doctoral student success is defined broadly to include not only completion and retention rates, but also the ability of the program to produce effective scholars in the field. The study utilized a mixed-method approach, incorporating quantitative and qualitative data from both alumni and current ...

Unlike the doctoral programs in places where students are paired with advisors at the time of admission itself, most US programs require the students to choose their advisors, and the advisors to formally accept the students as advisees. Little research has been done to understand how students and faculty approach this mutual selection and pairing process. This paper examines this process in STEM ...

Graduate students considering constructivist grounded theory as a qualitative methodological approach may benefit from recognizing the many challenges they could face when embarking in thesis work. These challenges include great diversity in approaches to grounded theory, lack of congruity in how grounded theory methodology is described and understood within the literature, and a dearth of experti ...

This article examines the questions of professional identity formulation and the possibilities of young scholars to reflect on these processes. Relying on insights of collaborative autoethnography, this article is based on a four year long process of exploring our ways of participating in the community of academic practice. This process is studied through discussing various metaphors related to ac ...

This study examined the relationship between graduate students’ research training environment, course experience, and research self-efficacy beliefs. The findings of the descriptive and regression analyses suggest that graduate students’ (n = 161) general research, quantitative, and qualitative research self-efficacy beliefs varied and that these beliefs were related to different aspects of the r ...

International forums for doctoral students offer a fertile context for developing strategic partnerships between higher education institutions, as well as for building the intercultural capacity of early career academics. However, there is limited research investigating the benefits of international doctoral forum partnerships. This paper presents learnings from a recent international doctoral for ...

The purpose of the present study was twofold. First, we used the three types of support depicted in Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (structure, involvement and autonomy support) to examine supervision practices in the doctoral context. Conversely, we used this material to discuss the theory and suggest new developments to it. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 former Ph ...

This article explores the value of attending to the emotional side of the doctoral journey by focusing on the use of a ‘secret’ Facebook group amongst a cohort of EdD (Professional Doctorate in Education) students at one English university. Presented as a piece of action research in which the participants created an intervention to address a perceived problem and then reflected on its effectivene ...

Formal structures that support doctoral student socialization are limited, while formal programs for Black women doctoral students specifically are even more scarce. The purpose of this research was to examine an early career professional development program for Black women doctoral students and its influence on the mentoring relationships developed by participants. We conducted individual intervi ...

While a lack of support has been identified as a contributing factor to non-persistence in graduate studies, there is an absence of literature that matches the provision of specific types of support services with outcomes at the doctoral level. The following questions were addressed in this study: (1) What is the role of institutional support in the persistence and success of graduate students? (2 ...

The purpose of the doctoral education process is to create and legitimize scholarly researchers. This transformation, from student to scholar, is widely discussed in the literature. However, recent rapid changes in university culture have resulted in less time for supervision, stricter completion deadlines, and a greater focus on efficiency and productivity. This has had an impact on this transiti ...

The use of the case study method has gained mainstream acceptance in both entrepreneurship and information systems research to develop conceptual and theoretical models that are novel, yet grounded in the literature. In spite of many texts on the case study method and the growing acceptance and use of thereof, there are relatively few examples that discuss how to apply the case study method. The p ...