Exploring the Relationship Between Supervisor Support and Anxiety of Graduate Students in China: The Mediating Role of Scientific Research Efficacy

Ma, Lichao; Yao, Hao; Hou, Jiaqi

doi:10.1007/s40299-023-00730-4

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Future research could use the coding scheme derived from this exploratory qualitative study to design survey questions to explore quantitative relationships between irreproducibility and mental health in larger samples, or to investigate whether responses to irreproducibility are related to personality traits or levels of self-efficacy. A handful of recent studies have shown relationships between graduate student mental health and scientific/research self-efficacy [41][42][43], and considering irreproducibility experiences as events that contribute to (or detract from) the development of scientific/research self-efficacy may aid in better theorizing this relationship.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience of irreproducibility as a risk factor for poor mental health in biomedical science doctoral students: A survey and interview-based study

Lubega,

Anderson,

Nelson

2023

PLoS ONE

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High rates of irreproducibility and of poor mental health in graduate students have been reported in the biomedical sciences in the past ten years, but to date, little research has investigated whether these two trends interact. In this study, we ask whether the experience of failing to replicate an expected finding impacts graduate students’ mental health. Using an online survey paired with semi-structured qualitative interviews, we examined how often biomedical science doctoral students at a large American public university experienced events that could be interpreted as failures to replicate and how they responded to these experiences. We found that almost all participants had experience with irreproducibility: 84% had failed to replicate their own results, 70% had failed to replicate a colleague’s finding, and 58% had failed to replicate a result from the published literature. Participants reported feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and depression while experiencing irreproducibility, and in 24% of cases, these emotional responses were strong enough to interfere with participants’ eating, sleeping, or ability to work. A majority (82%) of participants initially believed that the anomalous results could be attributed to their own error. However, after further experimentation, most participants concluded that the original result was wrong (38%), that there was a key difference between the original experiment and their own (17%), or that there was a problem with the protocol (17%). These results suggest that biomedical science graduate students may be biased towards initially interpreting failures to replicate as indicative of a lack of skill, which may trigger or perpetuate feelings of anxiety, depression, or impostorism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%