Comparing European Country Experiences on Researcher Community and Supervisory Support and Burnout

• In Event: 28.067 - Findings and Reflections From a Cross-National, Cross-Role (Ph.D., Post-Ph.D. Researchers) Research Program: Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

Social support is a central determinant of doctoral experience associated, for instance, with timely completion and satisfaction with study experience. Researcher community and supervisor(s) provide a central source of informational and emotional support, such as advice, feedback, and encouragement. The support experience is embedded within the broader socio-cultural context of doctoral studies, potentially resulting in cross-country variation in the support experiences. This may further either increase or decrease the risk of experiencing burnout, and study abandonment intentions in given context. Yet, little is known about such variation. This paper reports a five country comparison on support experience and its association with burnout among doctoral students in human sciences.

Methods
The data were collected in a Doctoral experience - survey utilizing, the scales on supervisory support (4 items), and researcher community support (5 items), abandonment intentions (one item), experienced burnout (total 9 items), including cynicism (5 items) and exhaustion 4 items) (with a 1-7 scale). Altogether, 2119 doctoral students (63.4 % women; 36.6 % men; mean age=34.12) in human sciences from Finland, Spain, UK, Estonia and Denmark responded to the survey.

Results
Doctoral students from the five countries reported high levels of supervisory and researcher community support. They also experienced some cynicism and a slightly heightened amounts of exhaustion. Multiple comparisons with Tamhane’s T2 revealed statistically significant differences in researcher community support between Finnish and Danish students (p < .05) and Estonian and Danish students (p < .01). Even though ANOVA indicated that there were differences between the countries in cynicism, multiple comparison suggests that these differences were not statistically significant. Finnish students reported lower levels of exhaustion than UK (p < .01), Spanish (p < .001), Danish (p < .05) and Estonian (p < .001) students.

There was a significant negative association between supervisory support and both cynicism (r(1767) = -.41, p < .001) and exhaustion (r(1770) = -.26, r < .001). Researcher community support and both cynicism (r(1758) = -.41, p < .001) and exhaustion (r(1761) =-.24, p < .001) were also significantly correlated. Supervisory and researcher community support were also related to abandonment intentions. Doctoral students with no study abandonment intentions (M = 5.89, SD = 1.40) reported higher levels (t(858.39) = 11.23, p < .001) of supervisory support than students who had considered abandonment (M = 4.81, SD 1.82). They also (M = 5.36, SD = 1.23) scored higher (t(914.47) = 11.82, p < .001) on researcher community support than students with abandonment intentions (M = 4.52, SD = 1.46).

Scholarly significance of the study or work
The study is among the first large scale cross-national comparisons on doctoral students’ researcher community and supervisory support. Results implied that the doctoral student experienced researcher community support varied across the five countries. The experienced support was associated with reduced risk of burnout and study abandonment implying that investing in sufficient support is a functional way to reduce burnout risk and related study abandonment regardless of national context.

Authors

• Kirsi Maria Pyhalto, University of Helsinki

• Jouni Aslak Peltonen, University of Oulu

• Lynn McAlpine, McGill University

• Erika Löfström, University of Helsinki

• Montserrat Castello, Universitat Ramon Llull