The Beginning of More Worries: Doctoral Candidates' Untold Stories After Submission of Dissertation.

Syed Abdul Waheed,Farooq Ahmad,Nadia Gilani,Mehwish Raza

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.537366

Syed Abdul Waheed, Farooq Ahmad + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.537366

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Abstract

The present study focused on this particular situation in which doctoral candidates become anxious, impatient, and disappointed while experiencing a prolonged delay in processing their dissertation during and after the submission. The researchers tend to explore doctoral candidates’ storied experiences they had while confronting such procedural barriers and delays. We undertook a narrative mode of inquiry to explore the events and storied experiences through interviewing doctoral candidates from public universities in the province of Punjab, Pakistan. Nine doctoral candidates were selected through snowball sampling with the criterion of including those participants who were waiting for their external reviews at least for more than 1 year. From the narratives, the emergent themes include supervisors’ mutual relationships, the pressure of paper publication, lack of administrative support, external evaluation and follow-up and stress of delayed evaluation. The study has implications for relaxing procedural formalities during and after submission of a doctoral dissertation to facilitate students in the timely attainment of their doctoral degrees.

Highlights

Recognizing the importance of research output, countries all over the world are committing considerable resources in order to bring advancement in their societies
The challenges emerged after interviewing the participants of the study are: supervisors’ mutual relationship and their supervisees, pressure of requirement of publication of the paper, lack of administrative support from head of the department, dean of the faculty and the controller of examination, inappropriate communication through electronic and internet sources, external evaluation and inactive followup mechanism by the administrative departments and a state of stress caused by the extraordinary delay
Professional jealousy exists in almost every profession and every culture (Dammani, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Recognizing the importance of research output, countries all over the world are committing considerable resources in order to bring advancement in their societies. In this regard, substantial investment is being made on doctoral candidates who are contributing significantly to the development of society (van de Schoot et al, 2013; Falk et al, 2019). The institutions of higher education provide opportunities for research and address students’ needs to accomplish their studies. They play a vital role in shaping doctoral students’ future as academic practitioners, early career researchers, and critical thinkers. Millett and Nettles (2006) argue that through doctoral education, future faculty are trained, and the

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