VISIONS OF EFFECTIVE DOCTORAL SUPERVISION: DISCIPLINES AND TRADITIONS IN A TIME OF CHANGE

The numbers of postgraduate doctoral students has steadily risen in Ireland and internationally in recent years. The Irish government has made a clear commitment to expand and develop research education, and the work of postgraduate students constitutes a vital part of the contribution of the university to research. Nationally, and within and across institutions, expectations are changing and a new infrastructure is being developed to meet the changes and improve the postgraduate research experience quality of supervisory practice has a demonstrable effect on postgraduate outcomes (Cullen et al, 1994) and recent research shows how supervisor behaviour and conceptions of the role may vary across disciplines (Zhao et al, 2007; Lee, 2008). In this paper we report the aims, approaches and preliminary results from the qualitative research study Visions of Supervision (VOS). The VOS study uses grounded theory methodology to explore how senior academic staff from differing disciplinary backgrounds conceptualise effective doctoral supervision at a time of change and development in fourth level education in Ireland. The study was conceived of and initiated in response to a review of the international research literature on supervision undertaken by one of the authors. From this we identified a lack of published literature exploring supervision practices through in-depth qualitative approaches and in detailed relation to contextual factors such as discipline. These lacunae, and our interest in understanding how supervisors were responding to the range and speed of developments influencing graduate education in Ireland, were the initial questions we sought to illuminate with our study and which we begin to address in this preliminary paper based on our conference presentation.