‘I Don't Even Have Time to be Their Friend!’ Ethical Dilemmas in Ph.D. Supervision in the Hard Sciences

Abstract

https://helda.helsinki.fi þÿ I d o n t e v e n h a v e t i m e t o b e t h e i r f r i e n d ! E t h i c a l d i l e m m a s i nPh.D. supervision in the hard sciences Löfström, Erika 2015 þÿ L ö f s t r ö m , E & P y h ä l t ö , K 2 0 1 5 , ' I d o n t e v e n h a v e t i m e t o b e t h e i r f r i e n d ! E t h i c a l dilemmas in Ph.D. supervision in the hard sciences ' , International Journal of Science Education , vol. 37 , no. 16 , pp. 2721Education , vol. 37 , no. 16 , pp. -2739 AbstractThis study focused on exploring students' and supervisors' perceptions of ethical problems in doctoral supervision in the natural sciences. Fifteen supervisors and doctoral students in one research community in the natural sciences were interviewed about their practices and experiences in the doctoral process and supervision. We explored to what extent doctoral students and supervisors experienced similar or different ethical challenges in the supervisory relationship and analyzed how the experiences of ethical dilemmas in supervision could be understood in light of the structure and practices of natural science research groups. The data were analyzed by theory-driven content analysis. Five ethical principles, namely, nonmaleficence, beneficence, autonomy, fidelity and justice, were used as a framework for identifying ethical issues. The results show that one major question that appears to underpin many of the emerging ethical issues is that the supervisors and students have different expectations of the supervisory role. A second important observation pertains to the fact that doctoral students primarily describing their own experiences, whereas, as might be expected, the supervisors described their activities as embedded in a system and elaborated on the causes and consequences on a system level.

What Are Ethics in Doctoral Supervision, and How Do They Matter? Doctoral Students’ Perspective

“…This article has described the development of a novel tool, namely, the Ethical Issues in Supervision Scales, which can serve the needs of institutions that wish to measure the "ethical pulse" of their doctoral education and supervisory practices. This tool has been developed based on a series of qualitative studies with data from both doctoral students (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014) supervisors (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2012) and both doctoral students and supervisors (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2015; 2017) in which we were able to identify ethical issues related to five principles. Thus, the instrument is not developed only deductively working from the ethical principles, but basing the items on ways in which the principles emerged in the in-depth qualitative data.…”

The Relationships between Doctoral Students’ Perceptions of Supervision and Burnout

“…A weakness in the group-based model, however, is that it typically involves orchestrating cooperation among supervisors, and finding a balance in the workload of individual students between their doctoral research and their group's research project can sometimes be problematic. It is possible that ambitious doctoral students become highly involved in several different projects, causing them to become overloaded with project work (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2015;. Consequently, there are risks that the supervisory support system fails to meet the doctoral student's needs of adequate support during the doctoral journey.…”

Doctoral Students’ Social Support Profiles and Their Relationship to Burnout, Drop-Out Intentions, and Time to Candidacy

“…Emotional support is characterized by empathy, trust, listening, caring, esteem, and belonging to a network of researcher communities with mutual obligations, whereas informational support is characterized by information, such as advice, feedback, affirmation, and suggestions that enable doctoral students to cope with the problems faced during their studies. Providing instrumental support, such as writing recommendations to foundations, allocating sufficient time to doctoral research, or dividing labor fairly within a research group, directly helps a doctoral student cope with the challenges of research work (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2015).…”