In the fields of public administration, policy, and public affairs, more women are earning PhD degrees and entering male-dominated academic and public sector job markets. This trend raises questions about the future of dissertation research and implications of gender on methodological approach and research design. This study examines the state of…

The research design of a study involves continual refinement through experiential processes. This case study demonstrates the importance to novice researchers of conducting a pilot study to test the feasibility of the study's research design and practice data collection (in this instance, interviewing skills). The case study is based on an…

The global COVID-19 pandemic has severely hit the lives of the people of Nepal. The country witnessed two phases of lockdown over 10 months from March 2020 until August 2021. I completed my PhD data collection in Nepal through February to April 2021, when the pandemic's risk was naturally lowered. My research explores local value systems of…

This article explores narrative-based, person-centered research, carried out by the author for his PhD dissertation, titled "Modern Day Slavery and the Sex Industry: Raising the Voices of Survivors and Collaborators While Confronting Sex Trafficking and Exploitation in Manitoba, Canada." The article describes interview dynamics…

A central trend in qualitative studies investigating doctoral students' dropout is to stress the importance of students' integration and socialisation in their working environment. Yet, few of these studies actually compared the experiences of doctoral students who completed or quit their PhD. In order to overcome this limitation and identify the…

The purpose of this study is to carry out a content analysis about the studies on teachers' professional development and to determine the tendencies in these studies. Within this scope, 60 studies that were registered to Turkish National Thesis Centre and ProQuest database between the years 2005-2015 were examined. Of the 60 studies, 37 of them…

Purpose: Despite the critical issues involving Middle East countries such as war and a drop in currency exchange rates, a large number of students leave their country to pursue a higher education abroad, every year. The purpose of this paper is to understand the difficulties that these students face while conducting their research in a foreign…

Desirable qualities for modern doctorate academic advisors in the USA that provide for successful completion were explored. In this mixed method study, both interview and survey data were collected. Interviews took place with 13 academic advisors and 18 doctoral candidates and graduates. Thirty-eight academic advisors and 151 candidates and…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine how a collective knowledge-creation-oriented approach to doctoral education is being adopted in research within the field of education. The authors interviewed nine leaders of national centres of excellence in science research and 12 education professors whose research communities cultivate…

While there has been considerable research on doctoral examination there is little that examines the various roles of the oral component and what issues one might consider if introducing or revising that aspect of the thesis examination process. This matter is of particular importance in Australia where it is not usual to have an oral component as…

The educational doctorate (EdD) is being re-envisioned as a distinct professional degree. Today's EdD graduates are envisioned as scholarly practitioners. Given this it may be reasoned these individuals have unique identities comprised of several layers. In this study, we examined how 18 entering students and 17 graduating students from an EdD…

Increase in numbers of postgraduate students worldwide represent an opportunity and necessity for nurturing and recognising the diversity of culturally inflected research topics, methodologies and expression. However, there are tensions in the definitions, encouragement and recognition of diversity in theses, and in balances of power in…

Background/Context: As prior research has established, historical thinking is shaped by disciplinary-specific reading and writing. Yet while our understanding of historical reading is relatively strong, our understanding of historical writing--and particularly, the core processes at work in historical writing--is less robust. Purpose: This…

Writing-for-publication is a practice that doctoral students should acquire for integration into international research culture. Publication rates and forms of pedagogy supporting the development of publication skills for doctoral students, however, remain inadequate worldwide. Limited data of doctoral student publication from African universities…

This Forum issue discusses the centrality of the fieldwork in doctoral research. The inevitability of researchers' influence and of their values apparent during and after their fieldwork calls for a high degree of reflexivity. Since the standard methodology textbooks do not sufficiently guide on addressing such challenges, doctoral researchers go…