Doctoral students’ writing profiles and their relations to well-being and perceptions of the academic environment

Abstract

using a person-centred approach. We also studied differences between profiles in terms of experienced well-being and perceptions of the learning environment. The participants of our study (n = 664) were PhD students from three faculties at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The Writing Process Questionnaire (Lonka et al., 2014) was used to measure writing conceptions and problematic writing. Well-being was measured by MED NORD, adapted to the doctoral context (Lonka et al., 2008;Stubb, Pyhältö & Lonka, 2011) and Perceptions of the learning environment, using specific items from Dahlin et al. (2005). PhD students with similar patterns of writing variables were identified through latent profile analysis (LPA). We conducted one-way ANOVAs to examine group differences with respect to well-being and perceptions of learning environment. We identified three writing profiles: Growth-Transforming (51%), Ambivalent (40%), and Fixed-Blocking (9%) groups. The Fixed-Blocking group reported a lack of interest the most often and also reported receiving the least feedback. The Growth-Transforming group was the most and the Fixed-Blocking group the least satisfied with their studies. It appeared that epistemic beliefs related to research writing were most decisive in differentiation among PhD students. Blocks were related to beliefs in innate ability. We concluded that although problems in writing are quite common, epistemic beliefs may be even more decisive in terms of successful research writing.

Measuring PhD Student’s Psychological Well-being: Are we seeing the whole picture?

“…Studies were mostly conducted in Europe (13/19 studies), the United States (6/19 studies), and Canada (5/19 studies). Two studies used the same longitudinal data set collected in Belgium (De Clercq et al, 2019;Levecque et al, 2017) and four studies used a Finnish data set (Lonka, Ketonen, Vekkaila, Cerrato Lara, & Pyhältö, 2019;Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012;Stubb, Pyhalto, & Lonka, 2012;Stubb et al, 2011). Two studies also analysed an international data set, with respondents located primarily in Canada and the United States (Devine & Hunter, 2017;Hunter & Devine, 2016).…”

“…Similarly, Lipson, Zhou, Wagner, Beck, and Eisenberg (2016) studied depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self-injury. Four studies described instances of exhaustion in PhD students (Lonka et al, 2019;Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012;Stubb et al, 2012;Stubb et al, 2011). Relatedly, two studies administered assessments of both mental health and well-being.…”

“…Four studies also investigated overall life satisfaction (Moate et al, 2019;Pychyl & Little, 1998;Rummell, 2015;Zahniser et al, 2017), while three studies measured domain-specific satisfaction such as with academic life and their job as a PhD student (Caesens, Stinglhamber, & Luypaert, 2014;Juniper, Walsh, Richardson, & Morley, 2012;Marais et al, 2018). Similarly, eight studies investigated motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, in line with well-being as theorised under self-determination theory (Anttila et al, 2015;Lonka et al, 2019;Lynch, Salikhova, & Salikhova, 2018;Marais et al, 2018;Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012;Stubb et al, 2012;Stubb et al, 2011;Sverdlik & Hall, 2019).…”

“…We extracted this information from the eligible articles and incorporated missing information from other sources, where possible. Five measures were administered across multiple studies: the Perceived Stress Scale (Caesens et al, 2014;Moate et al, 2019;Rummell, 2015;Sverdlik & Hall, 2019;Zahniser et al, 2017), the MED NORD (Anttila et al, 2015;Lonka et al, 2019;Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012;Stubb et al, 2012;Stubb et al, 2011), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Moate et al, 2019;Pychyl & Little, 1998), the Juniper PhD student well-being scale (Juniper et al, 2012;Marais et al, 2018), and the Motivation for a PhD scale (Marais et al, 2018;Sverdlik & Hall, 2019).…”

“…This questionnaire has high test-retest reliability, strong correlations with similar measures, and discriminates from emotional well-being in many populations (Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996). Five studies used another measure developed with medical students to assess well-being called the MED NORD questionnaire (Anttila et al, 2015;Lonka et al, 2019;Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012;Stubb et al, 2012;Stubb et al, 2011). This tool was developed and validated to assess well-being, which the authors conceptualised as stress, exhaustion, and anxiety, as well as other constructs like interest towards learning (Lonka et al, 2019).…”