Abstract:

This study aimed to investigate the influence of postgraduate students' perception of justice on their commitment levels. The realm of postgraduate education poses various challenges that significantly affect individuals' ongoing learning and development (Wu, 2022; Zerb et al., 2022). The theoretical framework was crafted using the works of Pace (1958, 1963, 1979) and Rusbult et al. (1998) to conceptualize academic commitment, alongside Homans (1961) and Adams (1965) to comprehend academic justice within postgraduate programs. Employing a discourse analysis methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 students enrolled in diverse master's and doctoral programs within the Brazilian Accounting field. The unique characteristics of this knowledge domain in Brazil render its postgraduate programs an ideal context for exploring the relationship between academic justice and students' commitment. The research protocol received ethical approval from an independent committee dedicated to investigations involving human subjects. The participant group was balanced in terms of gender, comprising five male and six female postgraduate students, spanning an age range from 24 to 51 years. The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured script, generating a corpus of 14 hours of recorded data and resulting in 352 pages of written text for discourse analysis. The key findings underscore the fundamental role of perceiving justice within the postgraduate environment in understanding students' academic commitment, particularly concerning the professor-student relationship. The interviews brought attention to several issues involving faculty members, including instances of misogyny, xenophobia, and psychological abuse. Additionally, participants highlighted the challenge of balancing work commitments with postgraduate studies, leading to limited opportunities for development and the need to manage time between work and academic pursuits. Notably, the interviews emphasized that a supportive and receptive environment fosters a heightened perception of justice, subsequently boosting postgraduate students' commitment and mitigating the dropout phenomenon. In this context, this paper provides both practical and theoretical contributions. On a practical level, it aids higher education institutions in addressing the existing challenges faced by graduate students. Furthermore, it enhances the literature by deepening the understanding of how the perception of justice within postgraduate programs can impact academic commitment. This study, like any research, is not without its limitations. Firstly, it focused on a specific group of postgraduate students in the field of Accounting in Brazil, thereby limiting the generalizability of the findings to other contexts, although theoretical generalization remains possible. Furthermore, the study relied on individual perceptions provided by the participants. It is important to acknowledge that these interpretations are subject to reinterpretation, refutation, or redirection by alternative viewpoints.

Keywords:

Postgraduate students, Academic justice, Student's Commitment.