Three dimensions and the three stages of the doctoral research journey

This contribution considers three dimensions of research supervision and the three main stages of the supervisor and candidate relationship during the research project. It does so in the hope of enriching our understanding, our management and experience of this complex, potentially fruitful and sometimes rather fraught relationship, which aims at developing a successful researcher, and producing a sound, achieved, well-written research project. The ideas and practices discussed here are both experience- and research-based. The experience is my own as a supervisor, with 30 students completed, 34 examined, and with ‘guardian supervisor' experience as part of a large cohort-based PhD which graduated 250 doctors. It also builds on experience as a facilitator of hundreds of workshops and courses for supervisors in the UK, Ireland, Australasia, South Africa, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados and Malaysia. The discussion is based in research, both my own and that of international others (to date some of it has informed The Good Supervisor (2005, 2nd ed., 2012) and a number of articles. The three dimensions I am considering here are personal, learning and institutional, and the three stages are the beginning, the middle and the end.