Navigating Spiritual Turmoil in the Doctoral Journey: An Autoethnographic Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spiritual turmoil, often overlooked in academic discourse, challenges identity, purpose, and meaning. This study explores spiritual turmoil through autoethnographic research, grounded in the researcher’s lived experiences during a doctoral journey. It addresses the gap in understanding the existential dimensions of learning and growth. Findings reveal that spiritual turmoil emerges gradually, influenced by life transitions, emotional stress, and existential uncertainties, often amplified by academic pressures. Key manifestations include a loss of meaning, social withdrawal, emotional and identity confusion, and questioning of values and purpose. In academic settings, this turmoil intersects with learning, as high workloads, misaligned personal and institutional goals, and competitive environments intensify its effects. While disrupting academic focus, spiritual turmoil acts as a catalyst for self-discovery, fostering psychological transformation, deeper reflection, and the realignment of personal and academic objectives. This research underscores how crises of meaning, though distressing, lead to renewed purpose and intellectual growth. By integrating autoethnographic insights with an exploration of spirituality in academia, the study offers a unique lens on navigating inner conflict and renewal. It provides valuable implications for educators, researchers, and learners, highlighting the transformative potential of spiritual turmoil in reshaping the intersection of education, personal growth, and existential meaning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".