Leveraging critical friendship to navigate doctoral student role transitions

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of critical friendship on a first- and last-year doctoral student’s novice and expert mindsets during role transitions. Doctoral students are challenged to navigate role transitions during their academic programs. Experiences in research expectations, academy acculturation and work-life balance, may impact doctoral students’ novice-expert mindsets and contribute to the costly problem of attrition. Universities offer generic doctoral support, but few support sources address the long-term self-directed nature of self-study. Design/methodology/approach The authors participated in a collaborative self-study over a 30-month period. The authors collected 35 personal shared journal entries and 12 recorded and transcribed discussions. The authors conducted a constant comparative analysis of the data, and individually and collaboratively coded the data for initial and focused codes to construct themes. Findings The critical friendship provided a safe space to explore the doctoral experiences and novice-expert mindsets, which the authors were not fully able to do with programmatic support alone. The authors identified nine specific strategies that positively impacted the novice-expert mindsets during the following role transitions: professional to student, student to graduate and graduate to professional. Originality/value While researchers have identified strategies and models for doctoral student support targeting specific milestones, this study identified strategies to support doctoral students’ novice-expert mindsets during role transitions. These strategies may benefit other graduate students, as well as faculty and program directors, as they work to support student completion.

A holistic model of resources to enhance the doctoral student's well-being

“…Instrumental, informational and emotional support from the peer (Mason and Hickman, 2019) and family (Boone et al ., 2020) helps in trust-building, mutual empowering, program completion, program satisfaction, development of students' doctoral competency at individual level. The sharing of emotional experiences with a critical friend in the form of a peer is a powerful tool that provides mutual empowerment, a shared understanding of their doctoral journey, support for the scholar during role transitions and a sense of belonging for both students (Gregory and Burbage, 2022; Tyndall and Powell, 2023; Schwoerer et al ., 2021).…”