Browsing by Author "Lammassaari, Heidi"

Today, high-quality science and research are considered as a crucial key for economic growth both in a national and international level. While the number of graduated PhDs has grown strongly and traditional researcher career is able to employ only a fraction part of PhD graduates, rapid technological developments and globalization have changed our society in a radical way. The trend is directed to increasingly consider the quality of doctoral education, as well as what kind of expertise is built during the doctoral process. There are several official documents considering the contents and goals of the doctoral education, but they do not necessarily reflect the doctoral students' personal experience, as the goals mentioned in the official documents are very abstract and dissertation-related. The aim of this study was to investigate how doctoral students who prepared their dissertation in an internationally highly valued scientific research group described expertise and its developmental situations in the context of doctoral education. In this study, doctoral students' descriptions is explored within the general framework of sociocultural views of expertise. The data was collected in a top-level research community in the field of natural sciences at a large research intensive Finnish university. Altogether, 7 doctoral students were interviewed. The research group in which the participants participated was internationally highly acknowledged, and in addition to the Big Science tradition, its functioning was based on a systematic doctoral education. The interviews were conducted as a semi-structured peer interview. The data was content analyzed by relying on an abductive strategy. The results showed that doctoral students described the most generic expertise which was able to be utilized in various contexts but was not committed to a specific scientific field. Thus, the results showed that doctoral students situated their descriptions of expertise typically to situations in which a doctoral student worked independently. For its part, this study confirms that in the context of doctoral education, expertise appears to be much more than just conducting research, although the doctoral education is generally considered to be rather theoretical and impractical. In addition, the results were in line with the former understanding that in the context of doctoral education, the progression of expertise is often perceived as an individual burden. This gives reason to explore how the practices in doctoral education could be developed further so that the processes of participation and knowledge creation, which are on the basis of modern expertise research, could be supported and fostered in a more elaborative way.