"It's Like Having Lots of Bricks": Doctoral Students' Research Perceptions and Writing Development

• In Event: 77.048 - Writing Development Across the Researcher's Career: From First-Year Ph.D. Researcher to Experienced Principal Investigator

Abstract

Writing is an essential part of research and it can serve diverse roles and functions in the communication of findings and in the generation of knowledge. At the same time, results of previous research have repeatedly shown how managing these roles and functions pose many challenges to researchers (Aitchison & Lee, 2006; Castelló & Iñesta, 2012). Researchers’ success and professional development might depend on their ability to overcome writing challenges, especially in the case of doctoral students, who need to complete a major piece of writing to graduate and are pressured to publish if they want to stay in academia. As research and writing are highly intertwined, also the problems doctoral students face during writing might be caused or influenced by challenges related to the research process and their interpretation of it. Previous studies have identified a variety of problems and challenges related to doctoral writing, but few have explored doctoral students’ writing development in relation to their perceptions and regarding research.

This study aims at exploring the problems and challenges doctoral students face when writing the dissertation, their evolution and impact on their texts and how these processes are influenced by doctoral students’ research perceptions. To explore these issues, we conducted a four-month longitudinal qualitative multiple-case study. Participants were four environmental sciences doctoral students' enrolled in a blended writing workshop. Data comprised an initial questionnaire, writing logs, two formative face-to-face meetings, a follow-up individual interview and each participant’s drafts of the text they were writing in the workshop. We identified research and writing contradictions and challenges mentioned by participants during the individual interviews and group sessions and matched them to the problems and challenges (everyday writing problems) they mentioned in the writing logs. In addition, we compared each draft with the following one and analysed the changes introduced and the overall evolution of the text. These changes were also matched to the general and everyday problems mentioned by each participant.

Participants faced a major contradiction between an experimental-positivist model of science and genres and the observational methodologies used. This contradiction was visible in their difficulties in establishing the objectives of the papers, among others. Other contradictions had to do with the role of reading and writing during the doctorate and their relationship with the research process: most of the writing was done during the last months of the doctorate and participants mainly read when they had to write a paper or their thesis. This caused them tensions with supervisors and was evident in their everyday writing in their struggles with the introduction and hypothesis. While each participant had a different writing approach, some commonalities were identified, such as the fact that all four participants started writing the results and discussion of their texts even before defining preliminary objectives of the study or chapter. The study sheds light on why some doctoral writing interventions are not effective and urges the adoption of a more innovative and integrated way to teach and conceive of writing and research at the doctoral level.

Authors

• Montserrat Castello, Universitat Ramon Llull

• Anna Sala-Bubaré, Ramon Llull University