Doctoral Students’ Emotions in Thesis Proposal Writing: Feelings, Triggers, Appraisals, and Coping Strategies

Abstract

Studies of doctoral writing have proliferated in the past three decades; however, little attention has been given to the emotional dimension of writing a thesis proposal, the first major writing threshold that beginning doctoral candidates must cross. My research aims to fill this gap, focusing on the experiences of first-year Chinese doctoral students studying in an English-speaking country for the first time. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, I administered an online survey (n=73) followed by semi-structured interviews with 24 participants from a wide range of disciplines. Informed by Roseman’s (1996) cognitive appraisal theory and Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) coping framework, I analysed the data to identify: (a) which emotions the students expressed towards their writing, (b) what factors triggered their emotions and how they appraised those triggers as impeding and/or facilitating writing, and (c) what coping strategies the students employed to deal with their writing emotions. First, I classified eight categories of emotion expressions using a lexicon corpus approach, with sadness being the most frequently reported emotion, followed by inspiration and happiness. Next, I identified a range of triggers for these emotions, which fell under four broad situations: Supervision, Writing Process, Research, and Collegial Community. Supervision, and particularly supervisors’ feedback, proved to be the most influential triggering situation. Finally, I developed three types of coping strategies commonly employed by the students in my study: emotion-focused coping, academic skills-focused coping, and passive coping. The first two types of strategies were further differentiated into self-facilitation-oriented coping and external facilitation-oriented coping, to highlight the types of support students sought for dealing with their emotions and writing. My thesis contributes a novel method for categorising free format emotion expressions in Chinese and English, and it builds on previous researchers’ work to propose a nuanced framework for understanding the multifaceted, dynamic and iterative nature of doctoral students’ writing emotions. I conclude with a set of practical recommendations to help supervisors, doctoral support staff, and students recognise and respond to the complex emotional dimension of doctoral writing.