Abstract:

There is a rich literature describing how PhD students perceive their supervisors´ qualities and attitudes. However, there is comparatively little knowledge about how supervisors work with their students. If it is true that primary and secondary school teaching is a lonely profession, then supervising is even more lonesome. We do not know much about the activities and behaviour of supervisors during the individual phases of PhD studies of their students. A metaphor of a black box which yields a successful or an unsuccessful student at the output is an apt model here. This situation is disappointing because it is the supervisor who plays a decisive role in shaping the knowledge, skills and attitudes of PhD students when socialising them into the science. We do not know about the frequency, duration and sequence of particular supervisor´s activities. We lack knowledge about how supervisors reflect on their behaviour and how their interaction with their students supports their own professional and personal growth. If we want to throw more light on the behaviour of the supervisors, we have to start to analyze it in an analytical manner. To do this, we have to constitute a methodological system that makes it possible to capture and describe his/her behaviour as minutely as possible. The present research is an attempt to set out to this direction.

We constituted a checklist of categories of supervisor´s behaviours which hierarchical and has three levels:
(1) behaviour prior to acceptance of a PhD applicant;
(2) behaviour during the PhD programme, and
(3) behaviour after completion of the PhD programme.

As expected, the second level is the most extensive one. It consists of 12 main categories, which are further subdivided into several levels of subcategories. Among the subcategories are, for instance orientating the student at the beginning of study, motivating the student, advising in project proposal, advising in research methodology, advising in data gathering and processing, advising in networking in the scientific community, advising in publishing research articles, advising in teaching, etc. Two methods of data gathering were proposed: supervisor’s self-rate of behaviour and doctoral students´ rating of supervisor’s behaviour. Methodology problems will be described concerning both manifested and latent data on the supervisor´s behaviour.

Keywords:

Supervisor, doctoral student, supervisor´s behaviour, checklist.