Identifying, prioritizing and ranking of factors influencing the PhD milestones’ completion delays

Abstract

The research oriented manpower is instrumental in the growth of economies. Unfortunately, the growth of doctoral research community is not keeping pace with the growing research requirements of India. “Time” to complete the milestones during the doctoral tenure is considered as an important constraint in doctoral degree completion. The present study mainly focus on this ‘time’ factor to complete the milestones in a doctoral life cycle. Secondary data and data collected through a focus group questionnaire survey were utilized. The opinions out of the survey were pairwise compared and ranked utilizing the Thurstone scale. The five doctoral lifecycle milestones identified through focus group discussions were enrolment, registration, synopsis submission, thesis submission, and viva-voce examination. The lack of administrative efficiency, guidance and publication; and delays in coursework completion and report arrival were found to be the most influential factors in delaying the different milestones completion in doctoral research. The findings out of this research can be further utilized to develop different policies towards overcoming these hurdles that can in turn lead to the timely completion of the different doctoral milestones. Moreover, this study can be generalized to other academic organizations as the doctoral journey milestones remain similar in every academic system in the world. Finally, some useful policy insights out of this study are presented.