We all know that starting a research project is not the same as starting the actual research. Administrative hurdles and research preparation simply take time – often more time than planned. Beginning in 2022, a research team of 10 partners from 10 different universities on 4 continents started working on the World University Network (WUN) project “Research supervision and mentoring practices: Ensuring support and building resilience of doctoral researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond”. The research aims to identify and analyze how PhD students and their supervisors, from a range of diverse institutional, disciplinary, and social contexts, have managed (or not) the impact of the pandemic and in what contexts resilience was observable.
Within the WUN project, we will work on three papers with different methodologies. The first relies on survey data. The second and third are more qualitative and those studies follow up on the survey findings. When planning the project, we recognised the challenges of working with such a diverse research group and, intending to collect data in 10 different universities, we might require inventive approaches.
The road towards research success is long and winding. We are now eight months into the project. We have learnt a lot about the benefits and challenges of working with ten universities across different disciplinary and institutional, and international cultures. Finding agreement on the survey instrument was not easily accomplished. There are contextual differences in the way PhD supervision is organised. Also, the local arrangements made during the COVID pandemic differed considerably per country and university. While this variation in approaches and policy responses is essential for the research, it does make it challenging to phrase questions that allow doctoral students and supervisors in all 10 locations to answer (using appropriate terminology). For example, the terms that we use globally are not the same. There is no uniform use of the terms supervisor, mentor, or advisor. This raises the essential question of what terms to use in the survey that will be understood similarly by all PhD respondents.
A second welcome issue was to positively harness the curiosity and individual interests of each partner in the team. We are lucky as a research team to work with a group of academics with solid roots in doctoral education practice and research. Yet, each of us has our specific research agenda, and we all participate in this project with a localised interest, as the outcomes of the study may potentially be informing localised change. During several long meetings, those interests led us in multiple directions. We spent considerable time suggesting new questions to add to the study, debating what elements to include or leave out. With help from our four fantastic interns, we tested the newly developed survey instrument and continued to reiterate and refine the questions in light of our cultural understanding. The meetings were highly productive, the discussions were deep and engaging, and in the end, we reached a consensus and a better-quality survey.
At that point, another challenge came to light. While in some universities in the study, the educational language is English, we also worked with a Taiwanese partner that educates doctoral students that are not always fluent in English. Translation of the instruments was needed to allow those students to participate in the survey and offer solid comparable responses. This was an effort we did not initially consider, yet we decided it was essential for the successful inclusion of the Taiwanese partner university. Equally, we learnt that variation in ethical procedures could be a source of delay in large international comparative research. Our ethical approval (completed by the lead university in The Netherlands) was not accepted in all partner countries. In Ghana, our partner had to submit all documents once more and comply with local rules before additional ethical approval was granted. She succeeded, albeit with some unanticipated delay, but we are delighted that we can also include Ghanaian students and supervisors in the study now. The more diversity of universities that we manage to include, the more interesting the study is likely to become.
In June, we completed the final survey instrument and launched data collection. Currently, we are in the exciting phase of reviewing the quality and information depth of the responses. Of course, as expected, we observed that – despite our efforts – not all the questions were as straightforward as we had hoped. We also noticed a variation in response rates across partner universities. Yet, at this stage we are also getting ready to explore initial findings and enhance our understanding of the nuances of doctoral education and student well-being in different international settings. I have no doubt that the analysis of the data and discussion of findings in our team meetings will be engaging and joyful. Our second blog, which we aim to share later in October 2022, will highlight some of our initial findings.
More information on the study can be found here.
We thank WUN RDF for their financial and network support.
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The opinions expressed here are the author’s own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of UNU.
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