The Role of Research Methodology in Enhancing Postgraduate Students Research Experience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34190/ejbrm.20.1.2253Keywords:
Keywords: postgraduate research experience, research methodology, postgraduate education, supervisory support, institutional supportAbstract
Postgraduate student research experience is key to understanding the quality of postgraduate education. This article presents the critical factors that can enhance postgraduate students' research experience. The research explored postgraduate students' research experiences (n=116) at a research-intensive public university in New Zealand. The aim was to inform the development of a more personalised and scalable research methodology programme. The study identified several factors that can significantly enhance the postgraduate research experience, including the quality of supervision, institutional and department support, personal investment, and financial support. Also, the study found that courses on research methodology play an essential role in improving the postgraduate experience. In particular, providing research methodology education to students during candidacy enriches postgraduate research experience and contributes to the timely completion of postgraduate education. Despite the demonstrated significance of research methodology in postgraduate education, findings revealed that students are generally dissatisfied with the design and teaching of current courses on research methods. Students said courses on research methods are pedagogically monolithic, conceptual challenging, and inflexibly adaptive to individual future career trajectories. Findings also suggest that the way research methods are taught is disengaged from practical problems, with some teaching focused on the higher level of abstraction, with less opportunity to apply what is gained from research methods courses. This research contributes to the growing need to transform the way we design and teach courses on research methods, and the importance employing a research-led approach to inform the transformation.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Ben Daniel
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Open Access Publishing
The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods operates an Open Access Policy. This means that users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is that authors control the integrity of their work, which should be properly acknowledged and cited.