Research Director, Colleague, Schoolmaster? Preferred and Experienced Supervising Styles of PhD-Students at Four Faculties

Abstract

What do the PhD candidates think of their supervisors’ supervising styles? What practices do they see as characteristic of their primary supervisors, and how does this compare to their own preferred style of supervision? And how is this linked to satisfaction with their supervisors and optimism for their thesis work? Using data from a web survey of 337 candidates at the Faculties of Law, Natural Sciences, Psychology and Social Sciences at the University of Bergen, the article explores these themes via principal component analysis to look for common elements in their answers, and via regression analysis to study how these answers are linked to various characteristics of the supervisors and the PhD candidates. The study finds some differences between the faculties and suggests some factors that are related to feelings of inadequacy in the supervisors and pessimism for their work on the thesis.