Understanding PhD student well-being and its influential drivers

Student well-being is one of crucial indicators to their mental health, academic performance, and future career aspiration, which will have a significant impact on economic, social, and intellectual costs in the long run. However, doctoral student well-being is currently not well understood in Hong Kong although there is an increasing attention on doctoral well-being in Western societies. Moreover, there is a lack of a comprehensive understanding of the influential contextual drivers (e.g., supervision, resources, research culture, progress and assessment, responsibilities, research skills, professional development, and opportunities) and personal drivers (e.g., age, gender, disability, ethnicity) that underpin it. The current study aimed at understanding PhD students’ well-being and examining how the postgraduate research environment predicts the well-being of PhD students from all disciplines across eight government-funded universities in Hong Kong. This presentation will present the preliminary results from 1,890 PhD students on these two aspects. The findings of this project will advance the literature by examining the role of the postgraduate research environment in enabling or inhibiting the well-being of PhD students. The proposed project moves the literature forward by examining the role of the postgraduate research environment in enabling or inhibiting well-being. The focus on environmental factors is solution-focused, because they are more malleable and amenable to policy and intervention efforts. By identifying the critical environmental factors most pertinent for well-being, it also yields actionable knowledge that can be used to craft effective policies and practices for optimizing doctoral wellbeing. Copyright © 2021 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.