Balancing between inspiration and exhaustion: PhD students' experienced socio-psychological well-being

Abstract

This paper explores doctoral students' experiences of their scholarly communities in terms of socio-psychological well-being. Further, the study examines how experiences were related to study engagement and to self-reported stress, exhaustion, and anxiety. Altogether 669 doctoral students from the University of Helsinki, Finland, responded a survey. The answers to an open-ended question were content analysed and then statistically compared to well-being and study engagement items. The results showed that there was variation in students' experiences of the scholarly community regarding socio-psychological well-being. More than half of the answers, where students had explicitly described their experience (n = 383), emphasised the scholarly community as source of burden (56%), but experiences of inspiration and empowerment were also frequently reported in the answers (44%). Feelings of empowerment were positively related to study engagement and negatively related to stress, exhaustion, and anxiety.