Browsing by Subject "tohtoriopiskelija"
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(2015)Objectives: Although doctoral students are a highly select group, previous national and international studies have shown that they experience many challenges during the process of completing a doctorate. These challenges can relate to well-being and many students never finish their degree. The purpose of this study was to discover the kinds of well-being experiences medical sciences doctoral students have. Previous research on Finnish doctoral education has investigated doctoral students' well-being via the sense of competence, belonging, autonomy (Ryan & Deci, 1985) , and contribution (Eccles, 2008). In this study, medical sciences doctoral students' experiences were explored via these four senses, in the context of eudaemonic well-being and positive psychology. In this study, doctoral students' well-being experiences were understood to develop in the dynamic interplay between their primary context of work and learning. The aim of this study was to investigate what kind of well-being experiences medical sciences doctoral students have and how those experiences appear in their primary context of working and learning as part of a scholarly community. This study is part of a larger national research project on doctoral education in Finland (Pyhältö et al., 2009). Methods: The data were collected between 2007–2008 with semi-structured interviews. The participants were seven female medical sciences doctoral students. One interview was dropped during the analysis process. All participants were conducting their doctorates at a research intensive university in Finland. The interviews underwent qualitative content analysis, in which the theory approach and inductive approach were combined. At the beginning of the first analysis phase, well-being experiences and their context were inspected by the variable-oriented technique. Next, the analysis focused on the person-oriented technique. Results and conclusions: The results suggested that the participants often emphasized a sense of competence and belonging. Doctoral students' experiences sometimes appeared in the sense of autonomy, but only seldom the sense of contribution. Well-being experiences were often related to research activities or interplay with members of a scholarly community, but only seldom to doctoral studies or financial resources. Person-oriented technique results suggested that well-being experiences varied between doctoral students. Some of them described many, while some only mentioned a few well-being experiences. Experiences were also emphasized differently. The findings reveal that it was relevant to investigate medical sciences doctoral students from the perspective of eudaemonia and positive psychology via the senses of competence, belonging, autonomy, and contribution. The results can be applied to the development of doctoral education and to develop methods to support doctoral students' well-being.
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(2015)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.
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