Browsing by Author "Urpilainen, Heidi"

The aim of this research was to examine what kind of experiences the doctoral students have about their thesis process and how they have managed to build their personal egocentric networks. The perspective concentrates on community of practice and how it affects the socialization of the new doctorates to the practices of the academic field. Previous research has not taken the practice perspective into account as much as it should. The disciplinary differences have been used to explain the varying practices of doctoral education. When the ways of knowledge production and institutional management change it is necessary to consider what kind of role practices play in the socialization process of new doctorates. The study was qualitative and the data was gathered through semi-structured theme interviews. It included the mapping of the personal egocentric networks using the name generator method. Participants consisted of 11 (N=11) doctoral students that represented the educational sciences and they were in different stages of their thesis process. The data was analyzed using data-oriented content analysis and ATLAS.ti program was utilized in this phase of the research. The egocentric network pictures were transformed in to digital form using Cytoscape and this made the analyzing of the networks much easier. It assisted to examine how many of the network members in each egocentric network presented academic, social or research advice type of support. The results indicated that there was not a clear conception about the field’s disciplinary practices. This could be seen when the results pointed out the individualistic conception about researchers skills and how learning should be managed independently in contrast to the ideal collaborative research work. Collaborative working and support still appears to be a struggle. In addition the supervision of the thesis process was dependent about “supervisor-student” –relationship and this resulted to experiences of insufficient supervising. The results also revealed that there should have been more collective support. The egocentric networks indicated that some doctoral students did not get enough support in their learning to become a doctor and this resulted in to feelings of isolation in the research community.