Come Hell or High Water: Doctoral Students’ Perceptions on Support Services and Persistence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While a lack of support has been identified as a contributing factor to non-persistence in graduate studies, there is an absence of literature that matches the provision of specific types of support services with outcomes at the doctoral level. The following questions were addressed in this study: (1) What is the role of institutional support in the persistence and success of graduate students? (2) What do students feel are some of the biggest barriers to graduate student persistence? (3) What do students feel are some of the factors that have a positive influence on persistence? Qualitative methods were employed; eleven interviews were conducted with current and former students who were currently or had previously been enrolled in a doctoral degree program in the social sciences and humanities disciplines. The study was undertaken at a large comprehensive university in Atlantic Canada. Overall findings point to the need to make transparent to doctoral students the role of institutional units and the support services they provide and the need to promote and raise awareness of these services. Five key themes emerged from this study with regards to doctoral student persistence and the role of support services: (1) the unclear role of institutional support; (2) financial considerations; (3) the culture and structure of academia; (4) individual characteristics; (5) support of others. Recommendations for policy, practice, and further research are presented.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it