I haven’t had a journal article accepted for publication in six years. Until today, by Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education…
Celbis, O.; van de Laar, M.; Windsor, W. L.; Papatsiba, V.; Ofosu-Ampong, K.; Kurawa, G.; Sadat Bole, A.; Ani-Ampsonah, Mary; Xu, Linlin
Towards an ecological systems approach to doctoral student resilience: qualitative evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic.
I’ll share the open access version when it’s ready, but here’s the abstract:
Authors:
Purpose
This study contributes to the growing body of literature documenting responses to short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral students. We examine support practices at different levels of the system in which doctoral students are embedded, drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model to better understand how these contribute to doctoral students’ degree of resilience under stress.
Design
Using paired online interviews, we explore the experiences of 21 doctoral students from 7 universities across Europe, Africa and Asia.
Findings
We find that support of supervisors at the microsystem level was a pivotal mediating factor in explaining to what extent the negative impacts of the pandemic were experienced by the doctoral students in our sample. At the same time, factors at the systemic level, such as weak infrastructure for online education, and limited incentives for supervisors to engage in additional mentoring beyond supervision, affected the repertoire of actions available to students at lower levels of the support system. In less resourced settings where systemic constraints were felt particularly strongly, students had to self-facilitate sources of resilience, resorting to peer and external mentors’ support at the mesosystem level of their environment.
#covid19 #pandemic #research #HigherEducation #PhD #postgraduate #resilience #Bronfenbrenner
