The Savvy Scientist

The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

phd supervisor burnout

PhDs are renowned for being stressful and when you add a global pandemic into the mix it’s no surprise that many students are struggling with their mental health. Unfortunately this can often lead to PhD fatigue which may eventually lead to burnout.

In this post we’ll explore what academic burnout is and how it comes about, then discuss some tips I picked up for managing mental health during my own PhD.

Please note that I am by no means an expert in this area. I’ve worked in seven different labs before, during and after my PhD so I have a fair idea of research stress but even so, I don’t have all the answers.

If you’re feeling burnt out or depressed and finding the pressure too much, please reach out to friends and family or give the Samaritans a call to talk things through.

Note – This post, and its follow on about maintaining PhD motivation were inspired by a reader who asked for recommendations on dealing with PhD fatigue. I love hearing from all of you, so if you have any ideas for topics which you, or others, could find useful please do let me know either in the comments section below or by getting in contact . Or just pop me a message to say hi. 🙂

This post is part of my PhD mindset series, you can check out the full series below:

  • PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health (this part!)
  • PhD Motivation: How to Stay Driven From Cover Letter to Completion
  • How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Studying

What is PhD Burnout?

Whenever I’ve gone anywhere near social media relating to PhDs I see overwhelmed PhD students who are some combination of overwhelmed, de-energised or depressed.

Specifically I often see Americans talking about the importance of talking through their PhD difficulties with a therapist, which I find a little alarming. It’s great to seek help but even better to avoid the need in the first place.

Sadly, none of this is unusual. As this survey shows, depression is common for PhD students and of note: at higher levels than for working professionals.

All of these feelings can be connected to academic burnout.

The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of:

– Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; – Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; – Reduced professional efficacy. Symptoms of burnout as classified by the WHO. Source .

This often leads to students falling completely out of love with the topic they decided to spend years of their life researching!

The pandemic has added extra pressures and constraints which can make it even more difficult to have a well balanced and positive PhD experience. Therefore it is more important than ever to take care of yourself, so that not only can you continue to make progress in your project but also ensure you stay healthy.

What are the Stages of Burnout?

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North developed a 12 stage model of burnout. The following graphic by The Present Psychologist does a great job at conveying each of these.

phd supervisor burnout

I don’t know about you, but I can personally identify with several of the stages and it’s scary to see how they can potentially lead down a path to complete mental and physical burnout. I also think it’s interesting that neglecting needs (stage 3) happens so early on. If you check in with yourself regularly you can hopefully halt your burnout journey at that point.

PhDs can be tough but burnout isn’t an inevitability. Here are a few suggestions for how you can look after your mental health and avoid academic burnout.

Overcoming PhD Burnout

Manage your energy levels, maintaining energy levels day to day.

  • Eat well and eat regularly. Try to avoid nutritionless high sugar foods which can play havoc with your energy levels. Instead aim for low GI food . Maybe I’m just getting old but I really do recommend eating some fruit and veg. My favourite book of 2021, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reduce Disease , is well worth a read. Not a fan of veggies? Either disguise them or at least eat some fruit such as apples and bananas. Sliced apple with some peanut butter is a delicious and nutritious low GI snack. Check out my series of posts on cooking nutritious meals on a budget.
  • Get enough sleep. It doesn’t take PhD-level research to realise that you need to rest properly if you want to avoid becoming exhausted! How much sleep someone needs to feel well-rested varies person to person, so I won’t prescribe that you get a specific amount, but 6-9 hours is the range typically recommended. Personally, I take getting enough sleep very seriously and try to get a minimum of 8 hours.

A side note on caffeine consumption: Do PhD students need caffeine to survive?

In a word, no!

Although a culture of caffeine consumption goes hand in hand with intense work, PhD students certainly don’t need caffeine to survive. How do I know? I didn’t have any at all during my own PhD. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it .

By all means consume as much caffeine as you want, just know that it doesn’t have to be a prerequisite for successfully completing a PhD.

Maintaining energy throughout your whole PhD

  • Pace yourself. As I mention later in the post I strongly recommend treating your PhD like a normal full-time job. This means only working 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday. Doing so could help realign your stress, anxiety and depression levels with comparatively less-depressed professional workers . There will of course be times when this isn’t possible and you’ll need to work longer hours to make a certain deadline. But working long hours should not be the norm. It’s good to try and balance the workload as best you can across the whole of your PhD. For instance, I often encourage people to start writing papers earlier than they think as these can later become chapters in your thesis. It’s things like this that can help you avoid excess stress in your final year.
  • Take time off to recharge. All work and no play makes for an exhausted PhD student! Make the most of opportunities to get involved with extracurricular activities (often at a discount!). I wrote a whole post about making the most of opportunities during your PhD . PhD students should have time for a social life, again I’ve written about that . Also give yourself permission to take time-off day to day for self care, whether that’s to go for a walk in nature, meet friends or binge-watch a show on Netflix. Even within a single working day I often find I’m far more efficient when I break up my work into chunks and allow myself to take time off in-between. This is also a good way to avoid procrastination!

Reduce Stress and Anxiety

During your PhD there will inevitably be times of stress. Your experiments may not be going as planned, deadlines may be coming up fast or you may find yourself pushed too far outside of your comfort zone. But if you manage your response well you’ll hopefully be able to avoid PhD burnout. I’ll say it again: stress does not need to lead to burnout!

Everyone is unique in terms of what works for them so I’d recommend writing down a list of what you find helpful when you feel stressed, anxious or sad and then you can refer to it when you next experience that feeling.

I’ve created a mental health reminders print-out to refer to when times get tough. It’s available now in the resources library (subscribe for free to get the password!).

phd supervisor burnout

Below are a few general suggestions to avoid PhD burnout which work for me and you may find helpful.

  • Exercise. When you’re feeling down it can be tough to motivate yourself to go and exercise but I always feel much better for it afterwards. When we exercise it helps our body to adapt at dealing with stress, so getting into a good habit can work wonders for both your mental and physical health. Why not see if your uni has any unusual sports or activities you could try? I tried scuba diving and surfing while at Imperial! But remember, exercise doesn’t need to be difficult. It could just involve going for a walk around the block at lunch or taking the stairs rather than the lift.
  • Cook / Bake. I appreciate that for many people cooking can be anything but relaxing, so if you don’t enjoy the pressure of cooking an actual meal perhaps give baking a go. Personally I really enjoy putting a podcast on and making food. Pinterest and Youtube can be great visual places to find new recipes.
  • Let your mind relax. Switching off is a skill and I’ve found meditation a great way to help clear my mind. It’s amazing how noticeably different I can feel afterwards, having not previously been aware of how many thoughts were buzzing around! Yoga can also be another good way to relax and be present in the moment. My partner and I have been working our way through 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene on Youtube and I’d recommend it as a good way to ease yourself in. As well as being great for your mind, yoga also ticks the box for exercise!
  • Read a book. I’ve previously written about the benefits of reading fiction * and I still believe it’s one of the best ways to relax. Reading allows you to immerse yourself in a different world and it’s a great way to entertain yourself during a commute.

* Wondering how I got something published in Science ? Read my guide here .

Talk It Through

  • Meet with your supervisor. Don’t suffer in silence, if you’re finding yourself struggling or burned out raise this with your supervisor and they should be able to work with you to find ways to reduce the pressure. This may involve you taking some time off, delegating some of your workload, suggesting an alternative course of action or signposting you to services your university offers.

Also remember that facing PhD-related challenges can be common. I wrote a whole post about mine in case you want to cheer yourself up! We can’t control everything we encounter, but we can control our response.

A free self-care checklist is also now available in the resources library , providing ideas to stay healthy and avoid PhD burnout.

phd supervisor burnout

Top Tips for Avoiding PhD Burnout

On top of everything we’ve covered in the sections above, here are a few overarching tips which I think could help you to avoid PhD burnout:

  • Work sensible hours . You shouldn’t feel under pressure from your supervisor or anyone else to be pulling crazy hours on a regular basis. Even if you adore your project it isn’t healthy to be forfeiting other aspects of your life such as food, sleep and friends. As a starting point I suggest treating your PhD as a 9-5 job. About a year into my PhD I shared how many hours I was working .
  • Reduce your use of social media. If you feel like social media could be having a negative impact on your mental health, why not try having a break from it?
  • Do things outside of your PhD . Bonus points if this includes spending time outdoors, getting exercise or spending time with friends. Basically, make sure the PhD isn’t the only thing occupying both your mental and physical ife.
  • Regularly check in on how you’re feeling. If you wait until you’re truly burnt out before seeking help, it is likely to take you a long time to recover and you may even feel that dropping out is your only option. While that can be a completely valid choice I would strongly suggest to check in with yourself on a regular basis and speak to someone early on (be that your supervisor, or a friend or family member) if you find yourself struggling.

I really hope that this post has been useful for you. Nothing is more important than your mental health and PhD burnout can really disrupt that. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions which you think other PhD scholars could find useful please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Study engagement and burnout of the phd candidates in medicine: a person-centered approach.

Lotta Tikkanen,

  • 1 Centre for University Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
  • 2 School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, Philosophical Faculty, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland
  • 3 Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
  • 4 Behavioral Informatics Team, Health Informatics Centre, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management, and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 5 Department of Learning, Informatics, Management, and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

This study focused on exploring individual variations in doctoral candidates’ well-being, in terms of experienced research engagement and burnout by using a person-centered approach. In addition, the associations between well-being profiles and gender, country of origin, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status and drop-out intentions were explored. The participants were 692 PhD candidates in the field of medicine. Latent profile analysis was employed to identify the well-being profiles. Four distinct profiles were identified: high engagement–low burnout, high engagement–moderate burnout, moderate engagement–moderate burnout , and moderate engagement–high burnout. Working in a clinical unit or hospital and working in a research group seemed to be related to increased engagement and reduced risk for suffering burnout, while the intentions to quit one’s doctoral studies were more frequently reported in profiles with moderate levels of engagement. The findings imply that although a significant number of PhD candidates in medicine had an increased risk for developing burnout, for most of the PhD candidates research education is an engaging experience.

Introduction

Undertaking a doctoral degree provides both highs and lows, potentially significantly reducing or increasing PhD candidates’ well-being (e.g., Stubb et al., 2011 ; Divaris et al., 2012 ; Caesens et al., 2014 ; Hunter and Devine, 2016 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ). Yet, previous research on the topic has focused heavily on the negative attributes such as stress (e.g., Oswalt and Riddock, 2007 ; Pappa et al., 2020 ), depression (e.g. Peluso et al., 2011 ; Levecque et al., 2017 ), anxiety (e.g., Barry et al., 2018 ; Liu et al., 2019 ), and exhaustion (e.g., Hunter and Devine, 2016 ), while positive aspects of PhD experience have been studied to a lesser extent ( Barnes and Randall, 2012 ; Sverdlik et al., 2018 ; Pyhältö et al., 2019 ). In particular, the number of studies exploring the combination or co-existence of positive and negative attributes of PhD candidates’ well-being is limited (for an exception, see Stubb et al., 2011 ), although PhD candidate’s well-being cannot be reduced simply to an absence of negative experiences ( Schmidt and Hansson, 2018 ).

A large body of research has indicated that the risk of burnout among physicians and other health care workers is high ( van Vendeloo et al., 2018 ; Dyrbye et al., 2020 ; Woo et al., 2020 ). The COVID-19-pandemic has further increased the risk of burnout among health care workers ( Chirico et al., 2021 ; Magnavita et al., 2021 ). In contrast, we know little about the well-being of research-active employees in the medical fields. Based on the literature on doctoral education, PhD candidates working in the medical context have rarely been studied. The medical research context is affected by the culture and hierarchy of the wider organizational culture of health care and hospital hierarchy, likely affecting PhD candidates’ well-being ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, there are at least two distinct subgroups of PhD students in these contexts ( Naylor et al., 2016 ): those who also work clinically and those working in the basic sciences. These two groups of PhD candidates often work under very different conditions, within the same medical university setting ( Naylor et al., 2016 ). More context-specific studies into PhD candidates in medical research education and the differing subgroups of PhD candidates in medicine have been called for ( Naylor et al., 2016 ; Kusurkar et al., 2021 ).

In this study, we aimed to explore the individual variation in well-being among PhD candidates in medicine by employing a person-centered approach. We focused on identifying burnout-engagement profiles employed by PhD candidates in the medical fields, and how they are related to working in a clinical unit or hospital, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status, and drop-out intentions. Also, differences between international and native (Swedish) PhDs candidates, and men and women were examined.

PhD Candidates’ Well-Being

PhD candidates’ study well-being is a multidimensional construct referring to a combination of positive mental states, such as satisfaction, self-efficacy or/and study engagement, and absence of extensive and severe negative ones such as burnout or strain related to doctoral studies, further contributing to a candidates ability to pursue their study goals ( Korhonen et al., 2014 ; Widlund et al., 2018 ). Study well-being is constructed in an interplay between demands and resources of the PhD. candidate and their doctoral study environment (see on study well-being among undergraduates Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2014 ). In this study, we explore PhD. candidates’ study well-being in terms of study engagement and burnout. It has been suggested that s tudy engagement is a symbol of an optimal PhD experience, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption ( Schaufeli et al., 2002b ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ). Among PhD candidates, engagement is typically manifested as high levels of energy and mental resilience while working with one’s doctoral research, a strong willingness to invest effort in the doctorate, a sense of significance, enthusiasm, and inspiration, and being fully focused on one’s work, whereby time passes quickly ( Virtanen and Pyhältö, 2012 ; Vekkaila et al., 2013 , 2014 ). Engagement in doctoral study has been shown to be positively related to study progress and negatively to drop-out intentions ( Castelló et al., 2016 ).

Study burnout , in turn, refers to a negative study experience that is characterized by two core symptoms, exhaustion and cynicism, resulting from prolonged stress ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; Salmela-Aro et al., 2009 ). Exhaustion refers to lack of emotional energy and chronic fatigue ( Maslach and Jackson, 1981 ), and cynicism refers to alienation from one’s studying, perceiving them as meaningless and losing interest in them ( Maslach, 2003 ). Burnout during doctoral study has been shown to be related to delaying doctoral study and intending to quit them ( Pyhältö et al., 2012 ; Anttila et al., 2015 ; Hunter and Devine, 2016 ; Cornér et al., 2017 ; Barry et al., 2018 ).

In variable-based studies, study engagement and burnout have typically been found to be negatively related to each other ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; González-Romá et al., 2006 ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ). This means that the PhD candidates experiencing high levels of study engagement are likely to experience low levels of study burnout and vice versa. However, various combinations of study engagement and burnout are also possible ( Tuominen-Soini and Salmela-Aro, 2014 ; Salmela-Aro and Read, 2017 ). For example, a PhD candidate can be highly engaged in their doctorate, but simultaneously experience high levels of exhaustion. A reason for this might the gradual development of burnout: burnout typically begins with exhaustion, and then, if working conditions remain the same, also the levels of cynicism increase ( Maslach and Leiter, 2016 ). Studies using a person-centered approach to explore PhD candidates’ study engagement and burnout simultaneously are scarce, resulting in a lack of knowledge about individual variations in the study well-being of PhD candidates in medicine. In addition, it is not known how different study well-being profiles are related to individual and contextual factors.

Antecedents of PhD Students’ Study Well-Being

Research has identified several individual and contextual antecedents of PhD candidates’ well-being. For instance, gender has been shown to be associated with study well-being, yet the evidence is mixed: although there is some evidence showing that female PhD students experience more stress and exhaustion than males ( Toews et al., 1997 ; McAlpine et al., 2020 ), there is also evidence of male postgraduates being more likely to experience increased levels of exhaustion than their female colleagues. Hunter and Devine (2016) , on the other hand, showed that PhD students’ gender was not associated with their experiences of exhaustion. The mixed findings imply that gendered impact may be dependent on the socio-cultural or disciplinary practices.

Some differences between international and native PhD candidates have also been reported. It has also been suggested that international PhD candidates are more career-oriented and more satisfied with their doctoral studies, which might make them more likely to experience research engagement compared to native PhD candidates ( Harman, 2003 ; Sakurai et al., 2017 ). However, international PhD candidates have also been shown to experience stress due to a lack of a supportive network ( Pappa et al., 2020 ), which increases their risk of burnout. Yet, evidence concerning the differences between domestic and international PhD candidates’ well-being is particularly limited.

Working conditions can be expected to have an impact on the well-being of PhD candidates in the medical fields. First, it has been suggested that the PhD candidates who are involved in clinical work experience high work strain due to constant balancing with their clinical or patient responsibilities and PhD research ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ), which makes them prone to burnout experiences. On the other hand, there is also evidence that real work-life experiences such as clinical work can inspire candidates in their doctoral studies, and thus contribute to increased engagement (see Vekkaila et al., 2013 ). In a qualitative case study, comparing clinically active and basic science PhD candidates in the same context, Naylor and others (2016) showed that clinical doctoral candidates were initially less competent in basic research skills than candidates who had learned these skills at earlier stages of their basic science education. An adjustment from an established position at the clinic to being a junior researcher in the laboratory was challenging. On the other hand, financial stress characterized the experience of the science candidates more than that of the clinicians. Clinical PhD candidates also saw research education as being more clearly connected to career opportunities in the future than their basic science counterparts in the same setting did. Perceived employment opportunities have been associated with lower burnout levels in biomedical PhD candidates ( Nagy et al., 2019 ). Differences in the working conditions of medical PhD candidates may thus affect the levels of burnout and engagement in differing ways.

Research group status, i.e., whether the PhD candidate is undertaking their doctoral research within a research group or alone, can be assumed to have impact on study well-being. Research group has been shown to be an important source of social support to PhD candidates, and hence, working in a research group can be assumed to increase the experienced engagement ( Stubb et al., 2011 ; Peltonen et al., 2017 ). However, it has also been found that working within a research group can be a source of stress ( Stubb et al., 2011 ). Moreover, study status, i.e., whether the PhD candidate is undertaking their degree part-time vs. full-time, may have an impact on their study well-being. Yet, the evidence in this regard is partly contradictory. While those who work full-time are shown to be more satisfied with their supervision and perceive the scholarly community as empowering compared to those who work part-time ( Stubb et al., 2011 ; Pyhältö et al., 2016 ), candidates working part-time are shown to be more satisfied with their mental health and friendships ( Isohätälä et al., 2017 ).

Aim of the Study

The aim of the study was to understand the individual differences in study well-being among PhD candidates in medicine. More specifically, we explored the PhD candidates’ study engagement–burnout profiles and their associations with background variables that have previously shown to be associated with PhD candidates’ well-being [i.e., gender, country of origin, and study status (i.e., whether they were completing their doctorate full-time or part-time], and research group status). We also explored whether PhD candidates classified into different study well-being profiles differed in their intensions to drop out from doctoral studies. The following general hypotheses were formulated:

H1 : Different study engagement–burnout profiles can be detected among PhD candidates in medicine, ranging from profiles with high levels of burnout and low levels of engagement to profiles with low levels of burnout and high levels of engagement. H2 : The PhD candidates in the different study well-being profiles differ from each other in terms of gender, country of origin (i.e., domestic/international), and whether they are completing their doctorate full-time or part-time, and whether they work in hospital/clinical unit or not, and whether they worked with their doctorate alone or as a part of a research group (i.e., research group status). H3 : The PhD candidates with different study well-being profiles differ in their intentions to quit the doctoral studying, i.e., the students with high levels of burnout and low level of engagement are more likely to consider dropping out from the doctorate than those with low levels of burnout and high levels of engagement.

Materials and Methods

Research context.

This study had a cross-sectional design. The data were collected during 2015–2016 through a web-based survey using a secure platform (Artologik). The survey was conducted in English. All PhD candidates at Karolinska Institutet with an activity rate of more than 10% 1 received an invitation to participate in the survey. Karolinska Institutet is a research-oriented medical university with more than 2000 PhD candidates enrolled. “Medical” is understood as an umbrella term encompassing a wide array of fields with a connection to medicine: From clinical research to a wide variety of basic research topics in microbiological and life sciences. Several allied health sciences, behavioral and medical social sciences, such as nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychology, medical ethics, and management are also represented.

All participants were enrolled in the same university-wide research education program and have the same overall formal requirements for their training, regarding the number of credits required from research education courses, general criteria for quality of research work, and basic structures of supervision and quality control of the research education process. However, within that universal organizational framework there is great variation in terms of the topics investigated, practices of individual research groups and supervisors and departmental structures.

There are clinical and basic science PhD candidates at Karolinska Institutet. The clinical PhD candidates typically work within two organizations: The hospital clinic or another health care organization (the manager or supervisor of the clinical work being the person the clinician reports to) and another one in the research group on the university side (the main doctoral supervisor most often being the candidate’s responsible manager). The basic science PhD candidates only work within one organization, the university, and have their main supervisor in doctoral education.

In Sweden, all PhD candidates are fully financed, meaning that they get a monthly salary. Their salary level depends on a variety of factors, mainly the source of finance (for example, grants from abroad, external competitive research funding, research funding from medical industry, or funding provided by the healthcare system for their employees). Clinical PhD candidates typically have considerably higher salaries than their basic science counterparts.

The context of the current study is similar to many other natural science contexts in that much of the research work is done within a research group, and a collaborative “teamwork research training structure” ( Chiang, 2003 ) is prevalent. However, there is considerable variation in this regard. At least two co-supervisors in addition to a main supervisor is an organizational norm.

Participants

In total, 2044 PhD candidates were invited and 692 responded to the survey (response rate 34%). PhD candidates were all in the medical fields. Of the participants, 61.3% were females and 36.6% males. The age of the participants ranged from 24 to 88, the mean being 35years. Forty six percent of the participants ( n =320) were Swedish and 53% ( n =366) were from another country. Of the participants, 67.2% ( n =465) reported that they were completing their doctorate full-time and 32.7% part-time. Nearly one-third (32.7%, n =226) of the participants were working in a hospital or a clinical unit. The proportion of those working mainly on their own with their doctorate was 54.8% ( n =379), and 44.4% ( n =307) of the participants reported that they were working in a research team.

Participants were informed that participation was completely voluntary and that they may withdraw from the study at any time without providing any explanation. They were also informed that all of the data which they provided would be strictly anonymous and treated confidentially, responses to the survey would not be linked to any other personal data and that analyses would be made at the group level. Before completing the survey, participants indicated that they had read and understood the information provided above and whether they agreed to participate in the study. The research was approved by the Swedish Central Ethical Review Board (Ref. No#2015/1626-31/5).

The participants completed the cross-country doctoral experience (C-DES) survey (see C-DES manual Pyhältö et al., 2018 ; Castelló et al., 2018 ). In this study, we used the following C-DES-scales to study PhD students’ study well-being: (1) research engagement (5 items) and (2) burnout in studying consisting of two factors: (a) exhaustion (4 items) and (b) cynicism (5 items). All items were rated on seven-point scales (1=not at all, 2=very rarely, 3=rarely, 4=sometimes, 5=often, 6=very often, 7=all the time; See Appendix 1 for the items). Mean variables were formed to represent research engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism in studying. The Cronbach alpha reliability and descriptive statistics of the subscales are shown in Table 1 .

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Table 1 . Descriptive statistics and correlations of the study variables.

Data Analyses

A latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to identify subgroups of individuals based on their experiences of study engagement and burnout. LPA is a person-centered approach that involves grouping individuals into latent classes based on their observed response patterns on specific variables instead of exploring the relationships between the variables ( Berlin et al., 2014 ). LPA provides statistical criteria for model comparisons in selecting the best-fitting number of latent classes and opportunity to include predictors and outcomes compared to other clustering approaches (e.g., Vermunt and Magidson, 2002 ; Morin et al., 2018 ). The analyses were carried out using Mplus version 8.6 and MLR estimator that produces maximum likelihood estimates with standard errors and χ 2 test statistics that are robust to non-normality ( Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2017 ). Within-class variances were held constant across classes. We used several statistical criteria to choose the best fitting model: The Akaike (AIC), the Bayesian (BIC), adjusted Bayesian (aBIC) information-based measures of fit, and a Vuong-Lo-Mendell-Rubin (VLMR) and Lo-Mendell-Rubin (aLRT), and bootstrapped (BLRT) likelihood ratio tests ( Nylund et al., 2007 ; Berlin et al., 2014 ). In addition, the theoretical meaningfulness of the profile solution was emphasized in selecting the number of profiles. The average latent class probabilities and entropy values were used to evaluate the clarity of different profile solutions.

To explore whether the PhD candidates with different study well-being profiles differed from each other in terms of background variables (gender, country of origin, working in clinical unit or hospital, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status), we used auxiliary Mplus command ( Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2017 ). The background variables were included as antecedents of the latent class variable while accounting for the measurement error in classification ( Asparouhov and Muthén, 2014 ). This analysis was carried out with the R3STEP procedure of Mplus that performs a multinomial logistic regression and provides the odds ratios describing the effect of background variables on the likelihood of membership in each of the latent profiles compared to other profiles ( McLarnon and O’Neill, 2018 ). DCAT procedure for Mplus was used for examining whether candidates in different profiles differed from each other in terms of their intentions to quit studying for their doctorate.

The Study Well-Being Profiles

LPAs were run with 1–6 classes ( Table 2 ). According to VLMR and aLRT likelihood ratio tests, adding a subsequent class increased the model fit all the way to six classes, while the information criteria (AIC, BIC, and aBIC) showed that adding a new latent profile enhanced the model fit all the way to five profiles. However, the elbow plot ( Figure 1 ) showed that the BIC and aBIC values clearly decreased from one to four profiles, after which the decline levelled off. Therefore, the four-profile solution was selected. The four-profile solution was also considered to be the most parsimonious model, had a clear theoretical interpretation, and included profiles with sufficiently large memberships (i.e., >5% of the cases). The entropy value (0.80) and latent class probabilities (>0.80) also showed sufficient separation between the profiles in the four-profile solution showed sufficient separation between the profiles.

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Table 2 . Information criteria values for different profile solutions in LPAs.

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Figure 1 . Elbow plot of information criteria for different profile solutions.

Four well-being profiles were identified ( Figure 2 ). The first study well-being profile was high engagement–low burnout profile (see Table 3 ). It was the second most common profile among the participants with a 32.7 percent share ( n =226). The PhD candidates in this profile reported rather high levels of study engagement meaning that they often felt enthusiastic and inspired by their doctoral work. They reported low levels of cynicism, but moderate levels of exhaustion. However, when compared to other profiles, the exhaustion levels were lowest in this profile.

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Figure 2 . Study well-being profiles of the PhD candidates in medicine.

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Table 3 . Profile means and standard deviations.

The second profile was high engagement–moderate burnout profile, and it was the most common profile among the participants with a 33.2 percent share ( n =230). The PhD candidates within this profile reported moderate levels of both exhaustion and cynicism, and high levels of study engagement. The third profile was moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile. It represented 25.1 percent of the participants ( n =174). The PhD candidates with this profile demonstrated moderate levels of study engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism. This means that although the PhD candidates within this profile felt rather inspired and enthusiastic about their doctoral studies, they also sometimes felt overwhelmed by the doctoral study related workload and perceived their doctoral studies as meaningless. The fourth profile was moderate engagement–high burnout profile. The PhD candidates with this profile reported high levels of both exhaustion and cynicism. The candidates’ high levels of study burnout were combined with moderate levels of study engagement. This profile represented 9.0 percent of the participants ( n =62) being the least common profile.

The profiles differed statistically significantly ( p <0.01) from each other in all study variables, research engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism.

The Antecedents of Study Well-Being Profiles

Gender and country of origin did not have statistically significant relationships with study well-being profiles. Whether the PhD candidates were completing their doctorate full-time or part-time did not predict the profile membership either.

The PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctoral thesis had higher odds of belonging to moderate engagement–high burnout profile than to high engagement–moderate burnout profile ( b =0.98, SE=0.38, p =0.011, OR=2.86, 95%CI[1.25–5.64]) or high engagement–low burnout profile ( b =1.35, SE=0.38, p <0.001, OR=4.22, 95%CI[1.83–8.11]) compared to those who were completing their doctorate in a research group. In addition, the PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctorate had higher odds of belonging to the moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile than to the high engagement—low burnout profile ( b =0.83, SE=0.25, p =0.001, OR=2.28, 95%CI[1.39–3.75]) compared to those working in research groups.

The PhD candidates who were working in a clinical unit or hospital had higher odds of belonging to high engagement–low burnout profile than to moderate burnout–moderate engagement ( b =0.61, SE=0.29, p =0.037, OR = 1.85, 95%CI[1.04–3.25]) or moderate engagement–high burnout ( b =1.30, SE=0.52, p =0.012, OR=3.56, 95%CI[1.30–9.72]) profiles compared to those who reported that they were not working in a clinical unit or hospital. Those working in hospital or clinical unit also had higher odds of belonging to high engagement–moderate burnout ( b =1.23, SE=0.50, p =0.015, OR=3.66, 95%CI[1.33–10.10]) profile than to moderate engagement–high burnout profile than those who were not working in a clinical unit or hospital.

Taken together, the PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctorate had higher odds of belonging to profiles displaying lower levels of engagement and higher levels of burnout compared to those working in a research group. In turn, the PhD candidates who reported working in a clinical unit or hospital had higher odds of belonging to profiles displaying higher levels of engagement and lower levels of burnout compared to those who were not at a clinical unit or hospital.

Differences Between PhD Candidates in Different Profiles in Their Dropout Intentions

The PhD candidates in various profiles differed statistically significantly from each other in terms of their dropout intentions [ χ 2 (3, N =690)=147.6, p <0.001]. The intentions to interrupt one’s doctoral studies were most frequently reported in the following profiles: moderate engagement–high burnout profile (74.7%) of the PhD candidates with this profile had considered dropping out) and moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile (53.4%). However, the candidates with profiles characterized by high study engagement reported less intentions to interrupt their doctoral studies: 7.2% of the PhD candidates with high engagement–low burnout profile and 16.6% with the high engagement–moderate burnout profile had considered dropping out.

Findings in the Light of the Literature

In this study, we explored PhD candidates’ research engagement–burnout profiles. Adopting a person-centered approach allowed us to explore individual variation in PhD candidates’ study well-being by considering both positive and negative attributes of well-being at the same time rather than concentrating on the negative ones which has been the focus of several previous studies (e.g., Oswalt and Riddock, 2007 ; Peluso et al., 2011 ; Levecque et al., 2017 ; Pappa et al., 2020 ). Four distinct profiles among the PhD candidates in the field of medicine were identified: high engagement–low burnout, high engagement–moderate burnout, moderate engagement–moderate burnout, and moderate engagement–high burnout. The person-oriented approach complements variable-based studies showing a negative association between engagement and burnout ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; González-Romá et al., 2006 ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ) by indicating that there are individual differences in how exhaustion, cynicism, and engagement can combine within a person. Our findings supported the bivariant approach on burnout and engagement, positing that burnout and engagement present two distinct, yet related dimensions of the individual’s affective study related experiences ( Shraga and Shirom, 2009 ; Larsen and McGraw, 2011 ; Shirom, 2011 ).

The results showed that the levels of research engagement were high or moderate in all the profiles and the most common profiles were those displaying high levels of engagement. Thus, the results indicate that undertaking doctoral studies in the field of medicine is a highly engaging experience. However, the results also showed that the risk of experiencing study burnout was also elevated (i.e., moderate or high) among most of the PhD candidates. These results are in line with earlier findings ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ) suggesting an increased risk of burnout in medical researcher education.

The results also showed that those PhD candidates who reported working alone with their doctoral studying were more likely to belong to the profiles displaying moderate levels of engagement and higher levels of burnout. This implies that engaging in researcher group provides a potential resource for cultivating not only study progress but also the candidate’s well-being, identified also in previous studies ( Pyhältö et al., 2009 ; Stubb et al., 2011 ; Peltonen et al., 2017 ). Interestingly, although medicine presents typical group-based discipline, i.e., the basic unit for conducting research is a research group providing the platform for researcher education, according to our results only about half of the candidates reported that they were engaged in a research group. This implies that formal research group structure does not automatically guarantee an experience of membership or a well-functioning collaboration with the research group.

The results showed that the PhD candidates who were working in a hospital or clinical unit had lower risk of experiencing burnout and were more likely to experience high levels of study engagement than others. This means that undertaking one’s doctoral degree when having clinical responsibilities might protect the PhD candidates from study burnout and support their study engagement. On the contrary, Kusurkar et al. (2021) found that candidates in clinical departments had lower autonomy and higher levels of conflict between work responsibilities, especially among those PhD candidates who were working with patients. A variety of factors may explain our finding. The relevance of the research itself and doctoral studies in general might become apparent in the clinical work and hence, be a source of research engagement (see also Vekkaila et al., 2013 ). On the other hand, the candidates engaging in clinical work might have more extensive support networks to draw from as a resource for their studying and recovery when needed. They might be also less stressed by their career prospects after completing the PhD degree or they might be aiming for a non-academic career to reduce the stress caused by the doctoral studies (see Nagy et al., 2019 ). In addition, financial security may explain the differences in burnout levels: Clinical PhD candidates typically receive a much higher salary than PhD candidates who do not have clinical training or employment. In addition, basic science researchers will typically rely on external, competitive funding not only for the research work itself but even for maintaining a position at the university, thereby having much lower job security than their clinically active counterparts, who always have the chance of increasing the proportion of clinical work, should funding for research be scarce.

International PhD candidates did not differ in their likelihood of belonging to any subgroup. As previous studies have suggested that although international students might be prone to experience stress ( Pappa et al., 2020 ), they are also likely to be motivated and satisfied with their studying ( Harman, 2003 ; Sakurai et al., 2017 ), and thus be likely to experience research engagement. To our knowledge, no earlier study has looked at engagement and burnout of international doctoral students specifically in the medical research education, a context that tends to be extremely international and intercultural. Based on this finding, it seems that there were no distinctive differences between the international and native PhD candidates regard to their engagement-burnout-profiles. Accordingly, this suggests that the international PhD candidates in the field of medicine are highly heterogeneous group in terms of study well-being, not primarily determined by their status as international students. For example, it might be that whether they experienced working alone or within a research group or were clinical vs. basic science medical PhD candidates, were more significant in terms of their well-being than being an international PhD student.

The PhD candidates within the profiles displaying moderate levels of engagement and moderate or high levels of burnout symptoms more often reported intention to quit the doctoral degree than those with high levels of engagement, which was in line with previous findings ( Anttila et al., 2015 ; Cornér et al., 2017 ). Hence, in addition to having mental health benefits, high levels of experienced engagement are related to study progress among PhD candidates in the field of medicine. Accordingly, investing in developing engaging doctoral education environments has potentially significant individual and organizational benefits, considering that according to previous studies, drop-out rates among the PhD candidates typically range from 25 to 60% (e.g., Council of Graduate Schools, 2004 ; Golde, 2005 ; McAlpine and Norton, 2006 ; Gardner, 2009 ).

Limitations of the Study

There are some methodological limitations in the study that need to be considered when interpreting the results. First, the criteria for selecting the number of profiles were ambiguous ( Nylund et al., 2007 ), and hence, further studies exploring whether similar profiles can be found among other groups of PhD candidates are needed. For example, models for how profiles can be reproduced in new samples are being developed and may be helpful in exploring the well-being of PhD candidates across different medical research contexts (e.g., Gillet et al., 2021 ). Second, it is important to note that due to cross-sectional design, causal or process-related conclusions between study well-being and dropping out cannot be drawn. Third, the survey was sent to all doctoral students at the university simultaneously. Although the number of students who responded is sufficient for the analyses conducted, the sample only represents 36% of all doctoral students enrolled in the program. This should be kept in mind when generalizing, as we do not know whether self-selection might have affected the results. Fourth, the study was carried out in a specific social-cultural country context and in health sciences, accordingly one should be careful in drawing conclusions based on the results, across the doctoral education systems or disciplines. Last, it is important to note that data were collected before the COVID-19-pandemic. The pandemic has affected both the clinical and basic-science doctoral students in many ways. Further studies are needed to explore how stress, engagement and well-being of doctoral students working in the medical context have been affected by the pandemic at its different phases and afterwards.

Undertaking a PhD in medical fields is an engaging experience for most of the PhD candidates. However, the results suggested that there are several PhD candidates with high or increased risk of burnout. Thus, it seems that individual differences occur between PhD candidates in terms of their well-being. For individuβals displaying a higher risk of burnout, it was more common to experience studying alone in their PhD compared to those with lower burnout risk. In addition, the lower risk of burnout was related to working in a clinical unit or hospital. Therefore, it can be concluded that in the field of medicine, working in research group, and in a clinical unit or hospital during their PhD can help buffering study burnout and provide sources of research engagement.

Practical Implications

The results of the present study can be used by educational developers and staff trainers working with doctoral education. The stressors experienced by basic science PhD candidates in the highly competitive, externally funded research universities need to be taken into consideration by supervisors and policymakers. Particular attention should be paid to the candidates who experience that they are studying alone. Supervisors should be encouraged to be particularly careful in mapping out the actual support networks of their PhD candidates, instead of just formal connections to officially defined research groups. Moreover, the similarities and differences between the conditions of the clinical and non-clinical PhD candidates are worth discussing, as they work in the same general setting. The positive news for medical universities is that despite the pressures and competing responsibilities, the medical research setting is often experienced as engaging and does not automatically lead to burnout, a message worth spreading in this community engaged with cutting-edge, life-saving academic research. The study also has implications for policymakers: the findings highlight the importance of surveillance of the occupational health within the hospitals to check the psychosocial risk factors for staff undergoing research education, not merely that of residents and other health care workers.

The results also provide directions for future research on PhD candidates’ well-being. Our findings suggested that although an official membership in a research group is common in medical university, over half of the participants in this study reported that they were working alone. Working alone instead of within a research group was more common in profiles with higher burnout levels and lower levels of engagement. Therefore, reasons for the finding that most of the participants experienced working alone needs to be studied further. For example, investigation is needed to see if working alone is an active choice of a candidate or whether it represents a failure of the research education system in ensuring a supportive setting for doctoral students. In such further investigations, special attention should be paid to the actual networks, communities of practice and support. Also, factors involved in medical doctoral students’ engagement and burnout warrant closer investigation. As engagement may be more of a day-to-day experience, while burnout takes more time to develop ( Sonnentag, 2017 ), it might be useful to look more closely at the sources of engagement for both the clinically active and the basic science subgroups of medical PhD candidates, both to identify them more precisely and to investigate the variability and trajectory of them. Given the highly competitive, high-pressure nature of research-oriented medical contexts, it might also be useful to look at experiences of exhaustion as separate from fully developed burnout, as recent research indicates that weariness does not necessarily develop into more serious burnout ( Gustavsson et al., 2010 ; Gillet et al., 2021 ). For PhD candidates, supervisors, and decision-makers in these competitive environments, where high workload is more the norm than the exception, a more detailed understanding of these processes would be invaluable in terms of identifying high-risk situations and individuals in urgent need of help.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The research was approved by the Swedish Central Ethical Review Board (Ref. No#2015/1626-31/5). The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

LT, KP, AB, and JN have contributed to writing the original draft and editing it. AB has contributed to data collection and project administration. LT has contributed to conducting the analyses. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727746/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: burnout, drop-out, PhD candidate, research engagement, well-being

Citation: Tikkanen L, Pyhältö K, Bujacz A and Nieminen J (2021) Study Engagement and Burnout of the PhD Candidates in Medicine: A Person-Centered Approach. Front. Psychol . 12:727746. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727746

Received: 19 June 2021; Accepted: 28 October 2021; Published: 23 November 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Tikkanen, Pyhältö, Bujacz and Nieminen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Lotta Tikkanen, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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‘You have to suffer for your PhD’: poor mental health among doctoral researchers – new research

phd supervisor burnout

Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster

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PhD students are the future of research, innovation and teaching at universities and beyond – but this future is at risk. There are already indications from previous research that there is a mental health crisis brewing among PhD researchers.

My colleagues and I studied the mental health of PhD researchers in the UK and discovered that, compared with working professionals, PhD students were more likely to meet the criteria for clinical levels of depression and anxiety. They were also more likely to have significantly more severe symptoms than the working-professional control group.

We surveyed 3,352 PhD students, as well as 1,256 working professionals who served as a matched comparison group . We used the questionnaires used by NHS mental health services to assess several mental health symptoms.

More than 40% of PhD students met the criteria for moderate to severe depression or anxiety. In contrast, 32% of working professionals met these criteria for depression, and 26% for anxiety.

The groups reported an equally high risk of suicide. Between 33% and 35% of both PhD students and working professionals met the criteria for “suicide risk”. The figures for suicide risk might be so high because of the high rates of depression found in our sample.

We also asked PhD students what they thought about their own and their peers’ mental health. More than 40% of PhD students believed that experiencing a mental health problem during your PhD is the norm. A similar number (41%) told us that most of their PhD colleagues had mental health problems.

Just over a third of PhD students had considered ending their studies altogether for mental health reasons.

Young woman in dark at library

There is clearly a high prevalence of mental health problems among PhD students, beyond those rates seen in the general public. Our results indicate a problem with the current system of PhD study – or perhaps with academic more widely. Academia notoriously encourages a culture of overwork and under-appreciation.

This mindset is present among PhD students. In our focus groups and surveys for other research , PhD students reported wearing their suffering as a badge of honour and a marker that they are working hard enough rather than too much. One student told us :

“There is a common belief … you have to suffer for the sake of your PhD, if you aren’t anxious or suffering from impostor syndrome, then you aren’t doing it "properly”.

We explored the potential risk factors that could lead to poor mental health among PhD students and the things that could protect their mental health.

Financial insecurity was one risk factor. Not all researchers receive funding to cover their course and personal expenses, and once their PhD is complete, there is no guarantee of a job. The number of people studying for a PhD is increasing without an equivalent increase in postdoctoral positions .

Another risk factor was conflict in their relationship with their academic supervisor . An analogy offered by one of our PhD student collaborators likened the academic supervisor to a “sword” that you can use to defeat the “PhD monster”. If your weapon is ineffective, then it makes tackling the monster a difficult – if not impossible – task. Supervisor difficulties can take many forms. These can include a supervisor being inaccessible, overly critical or lacking expertise.

A lack of interests or relationships outside PhD study, or the presence of stressors in students’ personal lives were also risk factors.

We have also found an association between poor mental health and high levels of perfectionism, impostor syndrome (feeling like you don’t belong or deserve to be studying for your PhD) and the sense of being isolated .

Better conversations

Doctoral research is not all doom and gloom. There are many students who find studying for a PhD to be both enjoyable and fulfilling , and there are many examples of cooperative and nurturing research environments across academia.

Studying for a PhD is an opportunity for researchers to spend several years learning and exploring a topic they are passionate about. It is a training programme intended to equip students with the skills and expertise to further the world’s knowledge. These examples of good practice provide opportunities for us to learn about what works well and disseminate them more widely.

The wellbeing and mental health of PhD students is a subject that we must continue to talk about and reflect on. However, these conversations need to happen in a way that considers the evidence, offers balance, and avoids perpetuating unhelpful myths.

Indeed, in our own study, we found that the percentage of PhD students who believed their peers had mental health problems and that poor mental health was the norm, exceeded the rates of students who actually met diagnostic criteria for a common mental health problem . That is, PhD students may be overestimating the already high number of their peers who experienced mental health problems.

We therefore need to be careful about the messages we put out on this topic, as we may inadvertently make the situation worse. If messages are too negative, we may add to the myth that all PhD students experience mental health problems and help maintain the toxicity of academic culture.

  • Mental health
  • Academic life
  • PhD research

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Profiles of doctoral students’ experience of ethics in supervision: an inter-country comparison

  • Open access
  • Published: 24 August 2022
  • Volume 86 , pages 617–636, ( 2023 )

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  • Erika Löfström   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0838-9626 1 ,
  • Jouni Peltonen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7458-6532 2 ,
  • Liezel Frick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4797-3323 3 ,
  • Katrin Niglas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0867-9594 4 &
  • Kirsi Pyhältö   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8766-0559 1 , 3  

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The purpose of this study was to examine variation in doctoral students’ experiences of ethics in doctoral supervision and how these experiences are related to research engagement, burnout, satisfaction, and intending to discontinue PhD studies. Data were collected from 860 doctoral students in Finland, Estonia, and South Africa. Four distinct profiles of ethics experience in doctoral supervision were identified, namely students puzzled by the supervision relationship, strugglers in the ethical landscape, seekers of ethical allies, and students with ethically trouble-free experiences. The results show that the profiles were related to research engagement, satisfaction with supervision and studies, and burnout. Not experiencing any major ethical problems in supervision was associated with experiencing higher engagement and satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies and low levels of exhaustion and cynicism. Similar profiles were identified across the countries, yet with different emphases. Both Estonian and South African PhD students were overrepresented in the profile of students with ethically trouble-free experiences, while the Finnish students were underrepresented in this profile. The Finnish PhD students were overrepresented among the seekers of ethical allies. Profiles provide information that can alert supervisors and administrators about the extent of the risk of burnout or discontinuing of PhD studies based on students’ negative experiences of the ethics in supervision.

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Introduction

Supervision calls for pedagogical considerations of ethics as practiced in the student-supervisor relationship (Halse & Bansel, 2012 ). We have previously shown that Finnish PhD students’ experiences of ethics in supervision predict research engagement, satisfaction with doctoral studies and supervision, burnout, and intentions to discontinue studies (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ). This indicates that sustainable experiences of ethics in the supervision relationship may not only provide a buffer against attrition (Cloete et al., 2015 ) and mental health problems documented in the literature on PhD students (Levecque et al., 2017 ; Reevy & Deason, 2014 ) but could provide a resource allowing doctoral students to flourish (Shin & Jung, 2014 ; Vekkaila et al., 2018 ) . In turn, negative experiences related to ethics in supervision may increase the risk of burnout and dropping out from doctoral studies (Jacobsson & Gillström, 2006 ). However, not much research is available on how doctoral students differ in their experiences of ethics in supervision and how these differences contribute to their research engagement, satisfaction, burnout, and intentions of discontinuing PhD studies. Even less is known about the variation in such experiences across different sociocultural contexts of doctoral education. This study provides insight into how doctoral students differ in their experiences of ethics in supervision and how these differences contribute to their research engagement, satisfaction, burnout, and discontinuing PhD studies and identifies variation in three distinct sociocultural contexts.

Theoretical underpinnings

  • Ethics in supervision

Ethics in supervision consist of components of normative principles about acceptable and nonacceptable behavior (ethics) and values that are essential in everyday practices, such as honesty and transparency (integrity) (Jordan, 2013 ). Here, we use the term ethics in supervision to encompass both dimensions in doctoral supervision. Supervision includes both expectations regarding moral positions and acting on those positions. Questions of ethics and integrity are simultaneously present in expectations regarding how research ought to be carried out and how the relationship between a supervisor and a doctoral candidate is construed. We operationalized ethics in supervision through a set of principles familiar from codes of conduct for researchers, such as the Singapore Statement (World Conferences on Research Integrity, 2010 ), and the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA, 2017 ), and research ethics guidelines, such as the Belmont Report (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical & Behavioral Research, 1979 ) and the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association WMA, 2013 ), to name a few. These principles include respect for autonomy , beneficence , non-maleficence , justice , and fidelity .

Respect for autonomy is a fundamental ethical principle and refers to the respect for individuals’ right to make decisions concerning themselves (Kitchener, 1985 , 2000 ). In doctoral supervision, this refers to providing sufficient space for the doctoral student to make choices regarding his or her research (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014 ). The autonomy experienced by doctoral students is shown to be a substantial source of engagement (Vekkaila et al., 2013 ). This does not mean that supervisors should not guide doctoral students in finding proper directions and helping them to make informed choices in the research process. If doctoral students’ freedom of choice or space to explore their own ideas are severely limited, or they feel that different options cannot be raised for discussion, it can infringe on their development in becoming independent researchers (Lee, 2008 ). There is evidence that students’ ethical views develop when supervisors show respect for the students’ own decisions regarding their research (Gray & Jordan, 2012 ). Furthermore, the lack of support that is experienced in the transition into an autonomous and independent researcher may expedite doctoral students’ decisions to discontinue PhD studies (Leijen et al., 2016 ).

Beneficence refers to an intention to do good for others. In supervisory relationships, this entails supporting the doctoral student in developing increased competence and independence and ultimately gaining a doctoral degree. Failure to provide benefits to the doctoral student can be a consequence of insufficient content, pedagogical, and supervisory competence including confusion about role expectations (Jairam & Kahl, 2012 ; Parker-Jenkins, 2018 ).

The principle of non-maleficence is compromised when the doctoral student or his or her rights are harmed in one way or another. In supervisory practices, this may take place as misappropriation or exploitation of a doctoral student’s work or through psychologically confounded relationships, involving a parent/child-like relations or an intimate relationship between a supervisor and a supervisee (Goodyear et al., 1992 ; Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014 ; Parker-Jenkins, 2018 ).

Supervisors use a range of strategies to level out the issues of power asymmetry in their pursuit of supporting doctoral students’ well-being and development (Elliot & Kobayashi, 2018 ). However, asymmetrical power relationships can cause breaches of the principle of justice (Kitchener, 1985 ). Doctoral students may find it difficult to assert themselves in situations in which seniority and expectations of gratitude influence ownership, authorship, or workload (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014 ; Yarwood-Ross & Haigh, 2014 ).

The principle of fidelity is a vital basis for sustaining any relationship. It includes keeping promises and treating others with respect (Kitchener, 1985 ; 2000 ). In supervision, breaches of fidelity involve failure to keep a supervision promise. The reasons for discontinued supervision may be fully comprehensible, such as a supervisor retiring, moving away, taking parental leave, or falling ill (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014 ; Wisker & Robinson, 2013 ; Yarwood-Ross & Haigh, 2014 ), but sometimes less so, that is, outright neglect (Johnson et al., 2000 ). In either case, the doctoral student may experience abandonment. Supervisor unavailability is one of the most disruptive aspects for progression in the doctoral journey (McAlpine, 2012 ). Insufficient supervision increases the risk of discontinuing doctoral studies (Pyhältö et al., 2012 ).

These five ethical principles converge on three thematic dimensions: first, the dimension ethical aspects in the research community, including social structures and programmatic aspects (FORM) , encompasses the principles of autonomy, beneficence, and fidelity. Second, the dimension fairness and adherence to common formal and informal rules as a means of ensuring equal treatment of doctoral students (RULE) encompasses justice, non-maleficence, and fidelity. Third, the dimension respect in personal relations (CARE) encompasses autonomy and beneficence. Positive experiences of these dimensions contribute to engagement and satisfaction while negative experiences contribute to burnout and intentions to drop out (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ).

Combining these dimensions of ethics in supervision raises a question about the interrelation between the constructs (for approaches related to burnout and engagement, see Shirom, 2011 ; Larsen & McGraw, 2011 ; Shraga & Shirom, 2009 ). If these dimensions are independent, one may score high on one and low on the other dimensions. For instance, a PhD student might simultaneously experience high levels of fairness and equal treatment of doctoral students (RULE) and lack of respect in personal relations (CARE). Alternatively, they may be dependent, and a high score on one dimension would correlate with a high score on the other. Applying a person-centered approach to PhD students’ experiences of ethics in supervision allows us to explore the question in more detail.

Study engagement and study burnout

Study engagement has been suggested as being a hallmark of optimal doctoral experience, characterized by sense of vigor , dedication , and absorption (Vekkaila et al., 2018 ; see seminal work on work engagement by Bakker & Demerouti, 2008 ; González-Romá et al., 2006 ; Schaufeli et al., 2002 ). Such doctoral experiences encompass immersion in research, a feeling of time passing quickly, strong psychological involvement in research combined with a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, positive challenge, and high levels of energy resulting in positive outcomes in post-PhD researcher careers (Shin & Jung, 2014 ; Vekkaila et al., 2018 ) . Doctoral students who receive sufficient supervisory and research community support are more likely to experience higher levels of engagement than their less fortunate peers (Pyhältö et al., 2016 ).

Problems in the supervisory relationship and lack of faculty support appear to be related to increased risk of burnout (Peluso et al., 2011 ). PhD burnout resulting from extensive and prolonged stress has two main symptoms, namely exhaustion characterized by a lack of emotional energy and feeling drained and tired of doctoral studies and cynicism comprising feeling that one’s research has lost its meaning and distancing oneself from the work and members of the research community (Maslach & Leiter, 2008 ). Research environment attributes, such as sufficient supervisory and research community support, sense of belonging, and good work-environment fit, have been found to be associated with reduced burnout risk and increased levels of engagement among doctoral students (Hunter & Devine, 2016 ). Burnout entails negative consequences including reduced research productivity, reduced engagement, reduced interest in research, study prolongation, and increased risk of discontinuing doctoral studies (Ali & Kohun, 2007 ; Pyhältö et al., 2018 ; Rigg et al., 2013 ).

Little is known about individual differences in doctoral students’ experiences of the ethics in supervision, and how these differences are related to supervision arrangements and student well-being or a lack thereof. The theoretical underpinnings and results from earlier studies in Finland (e.g., Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ) inspired us to hypothesize that the underlying structures concerning the experiences of ethics in supervision may be the same across different cultural contexts as similar problems have been described elsewhere (see Muthanna & Alduais, 2021 ). Therefore, we set out to identify profiles of doctoral students’ experiences of ethics in supervision and their association with engagement, burnout, and intentions to drop out in the historically diverse but culturally and regionally relatively similar contexts of Finland and Estonia, in comparison to the culturally and regionally rather different context of South Africa.

These countries have in common high levels of attrition and distress and exhaustion in addition to prolonged studies, insufficient supervision, and poor integration of doctoral students into the research community (ASSAf, 2010 ; Herman, 2011 ; Leijen et al., 2016 ; Stubb et al., 2011 ; Vassil & Solvak, 2012 ). There is evidence that 35–45% of Finnish doctoral students have considered discontinue studies (Pyhältö et al., 2016 ). In South Africa, the attrition rate amongst doctoral students is 22% nationally in the first year with less than half of candidates graduating within 7 years (Cloete et al., 2015 ). In Estonia, the reported attrition in the phase prior to planning our study was 34% (Vassil & Solvak, 2012 ). Outcomes such as exhaustion and attrition have been shown to be related to negative experiences of ethics in supervision (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ). These shared problems in doctoral education and differences in the settings make it relevant to study the chosen countries from the perspective of ethics in supervision and compare the results in order to understand universal and context-specific aspects of doctoral students’ experiences of the ethics in supervision. Following the above, we posed the research questions:

How do Finnish, South African, and Estonian PhD students experience the ethics in supervision, engagement, burnout, and satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies?

What kind of profiles do experiences of the ethics in supervision, engagement, burnout, and satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies constitute among Finnish, South African, and Estonian PhD students?

Is there a relationship between the experiences of ethics in supervision profiles and supervisory arrangements (frequency of supervision, number of supervisors, and individual or group supervision)?

As profiles of doctoral students’ experiences of the ethics in supervision have not been identified before using a broad set of key variables of importance in the doctoral experience, we were interested in the profiles as such in the comparative context set out for our study.

In Finland, doctoral studies are research-intensive rather than course-centered, and research generally begins immediately (Pyhältö et al., 2012 ). In Estonia, the recent reform of doctoral studies introduced a substantial amount of course work to the curriculum and regardless of the emphasis put on research, the first year of a doctoral program is often devoted to course work, leaving less time for research activities. In South Africa, doctoral studies are research oriented. Although professional doctorates are now included in the South African Higher Education Qualifications Sub-framework (Council on Higher Education, 2014 ), doctoral programs continue predominantly to be by research only, with no credit-bearing coursework.

Tuition fees

In Finland, doctoral education is publicly funded, and there are no tuition fees for students. However, there is no automatic funding for studying at the doctoral level. Students apply for competitive funding from a number of foundations that support research or find employment at the university on various projects, or outside the university (Pyhältö et al., 2011 ). In addition, in Estonia, doctoral education is publicly funded (Lepp et al., 2016 ). Since 2012, every student who is granted a doctoral study place receives a grant for 4 years. Recently, several Estonian universities have introduced a policy by which they grant doctoral students an income comparable to the average salary, but the Estonian data were collected in 2016, before this policy came into existence, and the grant was substantially smaller. Consequently, there has been a tradition of finding additional employment in or outside the university. In South Africa, the doctoral education system is funded by a combination of government subsidies and student fees (Cloete et al., 2015 ). Many students are already employed when enrolling for a doctorate or are soon usurped into academic positions. However, in humanities, arts, and social sciences, many students receive little or no financial support, while funded full time doctoral study is more common in STEM.

Supervision arrangements

In Finland, doctoral students are expected to have two named supervisors. One of these is generally a full professor. It is common that doctoral students take part in research seminars organized by a supervisor (Pyhältö et al., 2012 ). In Estonia, doctoral students must have at least one named supervisor at the professorial level, but if the supervisor is less experienced, the doctoral program committee commonly assigns a senior supervisor to support the process. A similar practice of teaming up inexperienced supervisors with more experienced ones is in place in South Africa, although a supervisor does not need to be at a professorial level. Given the current lack of suitably qualified supervisory capacity in a variety of fields, inexperienced supervisors are often allocated to students, and single student-supervisor dyadic arrangements are still common (Cloete et al., 2015 ).

Types of doctoral dissertation

In both Finland and Estonia, a doctoral dissertation can be written either as a monograph or as an article compilation, with the latter being more prevalent in many fields. The articles are usually co-authored with the supervisors and sometimes with other senior researchers (Lepp et al., 2016 ; Pyhältö et al., 2012 ). In South Africa, doctoral dissertations follow a variety of formats, including both monographs and publication-based theses, or various permutations of these formats (Odendaal & Frick, 2017 ).

Participants

The data were collected at four universities in 2016 and 2017 as independent surveys. The universities included two in Finland, one in Estonia and one in South Africa. All four have an international profile and play important national and regional roles. All are research universities, but they are at different stages of building up their research profiles. The response rate in each country was 25–26%. The data set consisted of 860 doctoral students with a mean age of 37.59 (Table 1 ). The largest subset, namely the Finnish data, are representative of age and disciplines, with women slightly overrepresented among the respondents.

Participation in the study was voluntary and based on informed consent. No incentives were offered. No personal identifiers were collected. In Finland and Estonia, an ethics review is not required for anonymous survey research involving healthy volunteer adults (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity, 2019 ; Estonian Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, 2017 ). In South Africa, an ethics review was conducted according to the ethical code of conduct of the university.

We utilized the Ethical Issues in Supervision Scale (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ), which contains 15 Likert-type items reflecting breaches of five ethical principles, namely respect of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and fidelity. The items address exploitation, misappropriation, lack of collective culture, lack of well-being, supervision competence, narrowness of perspective, imposition of supervisor’s views and values, inadequate supervision, abandonment, inequality, and unfair authorship.

Items from the Doctoral Experience Survey (Pyhältö et al., 2011 , 2016 ) were included to measure burnout (exhaustion and cynicism, drawing on Maslach et al., 2001 ) and engagement (originally adapted from Schaufeli et al., 2002 ) (Pyhältö et al., 2018 ). These items utilized Likert-type response scales (1 = fully disagree, 7 = fully agree).

Additional background items with various response scales from the Doctoral Experience Survey included: number of primary supervisors (one supervisor/two supervisors/no supervisor/other individual or entity); intention to drop out (yes/no); supervision model (whether the student received supervision mainly individually/in a group/or both); frequency of supervision (daily/weekly/once a month/once in 2 months/once in 6 months/less frequently); satisfaction with (a) doctoral studies and (b) supervision (1 = very dissatisfied, 7 = very satisfied); considering changing supervisor (yes/no); actual change of supervisor (yes/no).

After an initial screening of data, exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were performed to investigate the factor structure of the three scales: ethical issues in supervision, exhaustion, and engagement. We carried out a series of EFAs with maximum likelihood extraction and both orthogonal and oblique rotations. We based the decision about the number of factors to retain on both the eigenvalues of the factors and the theoretical salience of the rotated factors (see Table 2 for scales used for EFA and their factor scores). The factor structure is similar to the three-factor structure in Löfström and Pyhältö ( 2020 ), in which the five theoretically informed ethical principles converged into three thematic dimensions. The analyses of the burnout scale and the engagement scale supported a two-factor and a one-factor solution, respectively (see Table 2 ).

Doctoral student profiles of ethical experiences in supervision were identified through K-means cluster analysis performed on the three Ethical Issues in Supervision subscale scores ( FORM, RULE and CARE ). We performed several analyses with one to five clusters and selected a four-cluster solution, which was the best model both content-wise and in terms of parsimony. For inter-country comparisons, we used one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and suitable post hoc tests. Due to the differences in our subsample sizes, we used Gabriel’s test when we assumed that variances of three groups were homogenous and Tamhane’s T2 when this assumption was not supported by the data. We also used chi-square tests to detect any differences there might be in the student composition based on gender, format of doctoral dissertation, and supervisory arrangements as well as the differences between the countries in proportions in the profiles of ethical experiences.

The ethical experience profiles were analyzed in relation to experiences of engagement and burnout, satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies, and intentions to drop out through ANOVA, again along with Gabriel’s and Tamhane’s T2 multiple comparison tests and chi-square test. We determined the magnitude of the effect sizes (Cohen’s d ) referring to Cohen ( 1988 ): small ( d  = 0.2), medium ( d  = 0.5), and large ( d  = 0.8) effect size.

There were differences between countries concerning the doctoral students’ experiences in all three dimensions of ethics in supervision, engagement, burnout, satisfaction to supervision, and satisfaction to doctoral studies (see Table 3 ).

Because the cell sizes are unequal, but the homogeneity of variance assumption was supported by the data, we used Gabriel’s post hoc test here for pairwise comparisons when we assumed that the variances of the groups included in the comparison were equal which was supported by the data. According to Gabriel’s test, Finland differed from Estonia ( p  < 0.01, d  = 0.30) and South Africa ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.30) on the dimension ethical issues in the research community; including social structures and programmatic aspects (FORM ) in that the students exhibited lower scores, that is, a less positive experience. On the dimension fairness and adherence to common formal and informal rules as a means of ensuring equal treatment of doctoral students (RULE) , the South African experience differed slightly from that in Finland ( p  > 0.05, d  = 0.21) with higher scores, that is more positive experiences, while the Estonian score was in the middle indicating no statistically significant differences when compared to the results from the other two countries. On the dimension respect in personal relations (CARE) , Estonian doctoral students scored slightly lower, that is, more positive experiences, when compared to Finnish ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.30) and South African ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.29) PhD students.

South African doctoral students reported higher scores in engagement than their Finnish ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.29) and Estonian ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.31) colleagues. While the doctoral students from the three countries differed neither on cynicism nor drop out intentions, there was a difference between Finland and South Africa in exhaustion. South African students reported more exhaustion than their Finnish colleagues did ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.46). However, Finnish doctoral students were less satisfied with supervision than South African students were ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.23) and showed a lower satisfaction level in doctoral studies than both South African ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.43) and Estonian students ( p  < 0.01, d  = 0.32).

In a joint cluster analysis, we identified four doctoral students’ profiles according to their experiences of ethics in supervision (Fig.  1 ).

figure 1

Ethics in supervision profiles

Profile 1: Students puzzled by the supervision relationship (referred to as the puzzled ) ( n  = 160, 18.6%) had relatively high values on the FORM and RULE subscale scores, thus expressing an absence of ethical problems in terms of supervision arrangements, availability of supervisory support, and experiences of just and fair treatment. Nevertheless, they experienced challenges with the supervisory relationship, such as issues with the adequacy of the supervisory support and facilitation of independence.

Profile 2: Strugglers in the ethical landscape (referred to as strugglers ) ( n  = 96, 11.2%) expressed experiences of exploitation, misappropriation, lack of collective culture, lack of well-being, low supervisor competence, narrowness of perspective, imposition of supervisor’s views and values, inadequate supervision, abandonment, inequality, and unfair authorship. This profile stands out as having consistently the most negative experiences on all dimensions of the ethical landscape of supervision. We wish to remind the reader that low values, that is, an absence of problems, for the CARE variable indicate positive experiences.

Profile 3: Seekers of Ethical Allies (referred to as seekers ) ( n  = 192, 22.3%) had relatively high average scores on RULE but struggled somewhat with FORM. They expressed the view that there was a general absence of ethical problems in terms of supervision arrangements, availability of supervisory support, and experiences of just and fair treatment, but their experience with the ethical landscape was not entirely positive. Ethical problems are likely to be located at the structural and organizational levels and in the relationships within the research community. They feel taken care of in terms of the adequacy of the supervisory support, experiencing that their supervisors do care about their well-being and development. The profile suggests that supervisors are sufficiently experienced to be allies in any ethical confrontations with other parties.

Profile 4: Students with ethically trouble-free experience (referred to as the trouble-free ) ( n  = 412, 47.9%) had the highest scores on both FORM and RULE subscale scores and a low average score on the CARE subscale score, indicating an absence of ethical problems in terms of supervision arrangements, availability of supervisory support, and experiences of just and fair treatment. They feel taken care of in terms of the adequacy of the supervisory support, and their experience is that supervisors do care about their well-being and development.

The results of ANOVA tests revealed significant differences between the four profiles in engagement, exhaustion, cynicism, satisfaction with supervision, and satisfaction with doctoral studies (Table 4 ).

As a point of departure, we assumed that students in the four profiles diverge in their experiences of satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies, engagement and burnout, and intentions to discontinue PhD studies. We performed ANOVAs with Gabriel’s or Tamhane’s T2 post hoc test. Pairwise comparisons with Tamhane’s T2 indicated that differences in engagement appeared between profiles. The puzzled and the strugglers ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.35); the puzzled and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.57); the strugglers and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.87); and the seekers and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.60) differed from each other in engagement. Overall, the trouble-free were more engaged than the other profiles, but also the Puzzled deviated in a positive way. The effect size was large in the difference between the strugglers and the trouble-free .

As for exhaustion, Gabriels’s test indicated that differences appeared between the puzzled and the strugglers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.51); puzzled and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.61); strugglers and the seekers (p > 0.001, d = 0.73); strugglers and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 1.05); and the seekers and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.34). The strugglers exhibited the highest levels of exhaustion, and the trouble-free the lowest, with the puzzled and the seekers placing in between with relatively similar levels of cynicism. The effect size was large in the difference between the strugglers and the trouble-free .

We used Tamhane’s T2 to examine the differences between the groups on cynicism and found statistically significant differences between the puzzled and the strugglers ( p  < 0.05, d  = 0.41); the puzzled and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.88); the strugglers and the seekers ( p  < 0.01, d  = 0.45); the strugglers and the trouble-free ( p 0.001, d  = 1.18); and the seekers and the trouble-free ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.77). The strugglers exhibited the highest levels of cynicism, and the trouble-free the lowest, with the puzzled and the seekers placing in between with relatively similar levels of cynicism. The effect size was large in the difference between the puzzled and the trouble-free .

Tamhane’s T2 indicated that in satisfaction with supervision all the profiles differed significantly from each other. The trouble-free were more satisfied than the puzzled ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.97), the strugglers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 2.70) and the seekers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 1.46). The puzzled were more satisfied with supervision than the strugglers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 1.72) and the seekers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.65). The seekers were more satisfied with supervision than the strugglers were ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.84). The effect sizes were large in the difference between the trouble-free and the puzzled and the seekers and between the puzzled and the strugglers .

Gabriel’s test suggested that the trouble-free were more satisfied with their doctoral studies than the puzzled ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.65), the strugglers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 1.62), and the seekers ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.89). The puzzled were more satisfied than the strugglers were ( p  < 0.001, d  = 1.01), and the seekers were more satisfied than the strugglers were ( p  < 0.001, d  = 0.71). The effect sizes were large in the difference between the trouble-free and the strugglers and the seekers and between the puzzled and the strugglers .

For comparisons on intentions to drop out and more detailed aspects of supervision, chi-square test was used (see Table 5 ). More often, the strugglers harbored ideas of dropping out and had considered a change of supervisor more often than the other profiles. The seekers , however, had the highest rate of actually changing supervisor. Gender and model of supervision were not statistically significantly related to profile membership.

The representation of students from the three countries varied in the four profiles. The chi-square test we used to examine the differences between countries showed ( χ 2 [6, N  = 860] = 24.094, p  < 0.001) that Estonian doctoral students were underrepresented among the puzzled (observed count = 7/expected count 16) and slightly overrepresented among the trouble-free (52/41) . Finnish students were under-represented in the trouble-free profile (214/249), while at the same time overrepresented in seekers (132/114) . South African students were underrepresented among the seekers (42/59) and overrepresented among the trouble-free (146/126) .

The results show four profiles of doctoral students’ experience of ethics in supervision. To our knowledge, this is the first study identifying profiles that combine experiences of supervision and ethics among PhD students in a cross-national design. The results indicate that the ethics in supervision profiles are distinct, yet related dimensions of the ethics in supervision experiences. Despite contextual differences in emphases, the same structure holds for the full data set, further strengthening the validity of the identified profiles beyond a single context, and at the same time suggests that despite cultural differences the underpinning structure of experiences of supervision in ethics are the same across the contexts. Had this not been the case, we presume it had been revealed in the results as we compared culturally and regionally relatively similar contexts (Finland and Estonia), and culturally and regionally rather different contexts (Finland/Estonia and South Africa). The profiles can help institutions to analyze the ethical landscape of doctoral education and to identify challenges. The profiles can provide information about the extent of the risk zone of burnout or dropout based on negative experiences of the ethics in supervision.

The ethics in supervision materialized through the doctoral students’ experiences of Ethical issues in the research community, including social structures and programmatic aspects (FORM ), Fairness and adherence to common formal and informal rules as a means of ensuring equal treatment of doctoral students (RULE) , and Respect in personal relations (CARE). The Finnish students’ experiences emerged in general as less positive than the experiences of their Estonian and South-African peers. Qualitative analyses of Finnish doctoral students’ experiences of the ethics in supervision indicate a high level of sensitivity about ethical aspects (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014 , 2017 ), which may help explain why their answers were more critical. However, since we do not have comparison data from Estonia and South Africa, we can only speculate.

The profiles were the students puzzled by the supervision relationship; Strugglers in the ethical landscape ; seekers of ethical allies ; and the students with ethically trouble-free experiences . When the students did not experience major ethical problems in any of the ethical dimensions as in the case on the Trouble-free , this was related positively with engagement, low levels of exhaustion and cynicism, and high levels of satisfaction with supervision and doctoral studies. By contrast, the strugglers expressed challenges in all of the ethical dimensions. This was related negatively to engagement, high exhaustion and cynicism levels, low levels of satisfaction with doctoral studies and supervision, harboring thoughts of discontinuing studies, and considerations to change supervisors. This finding is in line with research showing that students who experience receiving insufficient supervisory support exhibit more burnout and are less satisfied with supervision and more likely to harbor thoughts about dropping out than their peers who experience receiving sufficient support (Peltonen et al., 2017 ).

While the puzzled showed indications of ethical challenges, they were in some regards “better off” than the seekers. Even if supervision failed to contribute to the doctoral students’ experiences of being fully respected in the supervision relation and supported in autonomy, the puzzled were more satisfied with the supervision than the seekers . Sound institutional structures and processes are important; particularly so in situations in which supervisors change, and the supervision relationship must be renegotiated (Wisker & Robinson, 2013 ) – something which was more common among the seekers than in the other profiles.

The consistent experiences of the two extremes and their relation to the outcome variables establish the importance of paying attention to doctoral students’ experiences ethics in supervision. It is important to keep in mind that the trouble-free represented the largest profile, suggesting that supervision generally takes place in a sound ethical landscape.

Differences emerged among the three countries. In Finland, the seekers and, in South Africa and in Estonia, the trouble-free were overrepresented. Research on Finnish doctoral students’ experiences of their main resources and challenges during their doctoral studies relate to supervision (resources), structures and programmatic features (challenges), and the apprenticeship nature of doctoral studies in Finland (Author et al., 2012), which may help explain why this profile is overrepresented. The emphasis is on seeking alliance with the supervisors while experiencing challenges with social structures and programmatic aspects. The relationship and importance of alliance with the supervisor is pronounced, perhaps at the expense of association with and involvement in doctoral programs. South African students have been reported as having high levels of burnout (ASSAf, 2010 ; Herman, 2011 ), and high levels of exhaustion were corroborated by our study. The conditions of the South African students are more demanding than for Finnish and Estonian students, in terms of tuition fees and economic matters. Yet, the South African students were highly engaged and satisfied with the supervision and their doctoral studies. For these students, there appears to be a balance between the perceived demands and the available resources (see Bakker & Demerouti, 2008 ), and a sense of fairness and care to mitigate against negative experiences of ethics in supervision. The Estonian students, in turn, exhibited relatively high levels of satisfaction, which may be a clue to understanding their overrepresentation in the trouble-free profile. Satisfaction has been shown to be related to positive experiences of ethics in supervision and indicative of a fit between the individuals and their learning-environment fit (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020 ).

We acknowledge that there are limitations in the study. The response rate was 25–26%. It is possible that students who have experiences at the extremes of the dimensions we researched were more prone to respond than their peers whose experiences were neutral.

We propose future research to investigate what movements take place in and out of profiles and whether movement patterns differ across countries. A longitudinal approach would provide insight into the dynamics at the intersection of doctoral student experience, supervisory practice, and ethics. While our study was focused on an inter-country comparison, we recognize the possibility of intra-country differences and therefore encourage research with a larger number of institutions, first within a country and, second, across countries.

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Löfström, E., Peltonen, J., Frick, L. et al. Profiles of doctoral students’ experience of ethics in supervision: an inter-country comparison. High Educ 86 , 617–636 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00917-6

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PhD Student Burnout

Fmhs-pgsa blog.

Doctoral study is associated with high levels of anxiety and depressive symptomatology, and poor wellbeing overall (1) . Unsurprisingly, the prevalence of burnout is also high among this population (2) . Along with PhD students, nursing and medical students also suffer from disproportionate rates of burnout (3) . This is not a great omen for PhD students in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences.

phd supervisor burnout

What is burnout?

Burnout is defined as ‘‘ a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy ’’ (4) .

Exhaustion may include fatigue and low energy due to the draining of emotional resources (5) . Cynicism may refer to an attitude of distancing from work or feelings of indifference towards work. Inefficacy refers to lower rates of success at work or reduced accomplishments.

It’s important to note that burnout is not a failure of the individual. While precise definitions of burnout may vary, the core issue is chronic workplace stress due to poor management. Most of all, burnout reflects a failure of the system.

Universities should take note that the experience of burnout is linked to attrition intentions among PhD students (6.7) .

phd supervisor burnout

HOW DOES BURNOUT FEEL FOR PHD STUDENTS?

For PhD students, burnout may feel like high levels of chronic stress . PhD students often serve in a variety of roles as teachers, students, and researchers, and this unclear delineation of roles may in itself be a source of burnout stress.

Students experiencing burnout may feel under constant strain, unhappy, and experience depressive symptoms . Students may experience sleeping difficulties due to worries and an inability to overcome difficulties.

Additionally, burnout feels like emotional exhaustion. Students experiencing burnout may feel increasingly irritable and strained. Students might feel resentful, taken for granted, and with nothing left to give. Depersonalization, or a feeling of detachment, may be experienced such that students appear emotionally cold. 

Feelings of worthlessness and lack of accomplishment are typical during episodes of burnout. Students may feel an absence of motivation to complete their work.

Finally, physical symptoms may accompany the psychological symptoms of burnout. Fatigue, exhaustion, headaches, gastrointestinal disturbances, hypertension, colds, and flu are among the physical symptoms associated with burnout (8.9). 

phd supervisor burnout

I think I’m getting better at recognising burnout because it’s happened so much and it’s getting quite normal. For me, I just tend to feel tired a lot and start to experience apathy and anhedonia. For me, recovery requires taking long breaks (at least a few days) from work, and finding time to reconnect with the people and things that I love.

What contributes to burnout?

Key predictors of burnout among doctoral students include:

  • Chronic stress (9, 10) 
  • Low frequency of supervision (7) 
  • Lack of satisfaction with supervision (2, 7, 10) 
  • Lack of equality among researchers (7) 
  • Poor sleep quality (11)
  • Bullying by faculty members (12) 
  • Feeling a lack of belongingness to a team (13) 
  • Conflict in work responsibilities (2, 13) 
  • Low autonomy (13) 

Perfectionism, subjective appraisal of employment opportunities, and an existing psychiatric disorder may also increase risk of burnout (6, 14). 

phd supervisor burnout

What reduces risk of burnout?

The risk of burnout may be decreased by:

  • Doing PhD in hometown (2) 
  • Quality supervision- emotional, social, and informational support (7, 10, 15, 16) 
  • Equal treatment as part of research community (7) 
  • Regular supervisory meetings (7) 
  • Sense of belonging (17) 
  • Social support (18) 

Of the predictors and risk factors, supervision appears to have a consistent and powerful impact on burnout for doctoral students. Quality supervision has a buffering effect on stress which social support from family/friends cannot match (16) .

I think the key to avoiding burnout during PhD is 1) setting realistic milestones, and 2) making sure you meet them along the way. Often PhD students set unrealistic milestones and feel like a failure if these are not met. The best way around this is to check in with your supervisor and your peers who may have more experience in how long tasks may take. And secondly, three to four years seems like a really long time but it will really be over quite quickly. Therefore students should work consistently throughout the PhD to ensure that these realistic milestones are met. Making progress in small but consistent increments should help avoid overload and risk of burnout. Remember it is a marathon not a sprint!

HOW CAN YOU PROTECT AGAINST BURNOUT?

The prevention of burnout is not an individual responsibility, but a collective one. Universities should identify risk factors for burnout and attempt to mitigate these. These efforts might include specialised training to aid doctoral supervisors in developing constructive and supportive leadership styles; clear and comprehensive information on the roles and responsibilities of doctoral students; and fostering of a cohesive community for doctoral students, faculty, and staff (1, 10, 15, 16, 19).

In the absence of power to drastically change university systems and culture, an individual doctoral student might be able to slightly reduce burnout risk by:

Engaging with peers.

Peer support has been shown to help with motivation, identification of stressful tasks and workloads, and confidence to talk with supervisors about changes that are needed to prevent burnout (20). 

Active involvement in the academic community.

Students are more likely to feel empowered when they actively engage in the research community (17) . Students may attend conferences or participate in academic events or seminars to increase their involvement.

Avoid overload.

It can be difficult for students to say no to extra work due to several factors including the power imbalance between supervisors and students. But if students can cut down on tasks that don’t serve them, this would be beneficial (19). 

Prioritise sleep.

Sleep was frequently mentioned in studies of doctoral student burnout. Better sleep quality and duration is a modifiable factor that may reduce the risk of transitioning from ‘stressed’ to ‘exhausted’ (11). 

  • Levecque K, Anseel F, de Beuckelaer A, van der Heyden J, Gisle L. Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students. Research Policy . 2017;46(4):868-879. doi:10.1016/J.RESPOL.2017.02.008
  • Sorrel MA, Ángel Martínez-Huertas J, Arconada M. It Must have been Burnout: Prevalence and Related Factors among Spanish PhD Students. The Spanish Journal of Psychology . 2020;23:1-13. doi:10.1017/SJP.2020.31
  • Bullock G, Kraft L, Amsden K, … WGC medical, 2017 undefined. The prevalence and effect of burnout on graduate healthcare students. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov . Accessed August 1, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5661741/
  • Maslach C, … WSA review of, 2001 undefined. Job burnout. dspace.library.uu.nl . Accessed August 1, 2022. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/13606/maslach_01_jobburnout.pdf?sequen
  • Schaufeli WB, Martínez IM, Pinto AM, Salanova M, Barker AB. Burnout and engagement in university students a cross-national study. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology . 2002;33(5):464-481. doi:10.1177/0022022102033005003
  • Nagy G, Fang C, Hish A, … LKCS, 2019 undefined. Burnout and mental health problems in biomedical doctoral students. Am Soc Cell Biol . 2019;18(2):1-14. doi:10.1187/cbe.18-09-0198
  • Cornér S, Löfström E, Doctoral KPIJ of, 2017 undefined. The relationship between doctoral students’ perceptions of supervision and burnout. helda.helsinki.fi . doi:10.28945/3754
  • Symptoms of professional burnout: A review of the empirical evidence.: EBSCOhost. Accessed August 1, 2022. https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=b9d14b7e-56fe-4370-8d56-049a6bad9a99%40redis
  • Meis L de, Velloso A, Lannes D, … MCBJ of, 2003 undefined. The growing competition in Brazilian science: rites of passage, stress and burnout. SciELO Brasil . 36(9):2003. Accessed August 1, 2022. https://www.scielo.br/j/bjmbr/a/X9Fby6spKPD7B9mt4PcSHsF/abstract/?lang=en
  • Allen HK, Lilly F, Green KM, Zanjani F, Vincent KB, Arria AM. Graduate Student Burnout: Substance Use, Mental Health, and the Moderating Role of Advisor Satisfaction. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction . 2022;20(2):1130-1146. doi:10.1007/S11469-020-00431-9/TABLES/3
  • Allen HK, Barrall AL, Vincent KB, Arria AM. Stress and Burnout Among Graduate Students: Moderation by Sleep Duration and Quality. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine . 2021;28(1):21-28. doi:10.1007/S12529-020-09867-8/FIGURES/2
  • Goodboy A, Martin M, Johnson Z. Communication Research Reports The Relationships Between Workplace Bullying by Graduate Faculty with Graduate Students’ Burnout and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors. doi:10.1080/08824096.2015.1052904
  • Kusurkar RA, van der Burgt SME, Isik U, et al. Burnout and engagement among PhD students in medicine: the BEeP study. Perspectives on Medical Education . 2021;10(2):110-117. doi:10.1007/S40037-020-00637-6/FIGURES/2
  • Chun KH. 의과대학ㆍ의학전문대학원생의 학업소진 양상과 관련 변인들과의 관계 Relationship between Academic Burnout of Medical and Graduate Students and Related Variables. Korean Medical Education Review . 2014;16(2):77-87. Accessed August 1, 2022. http://www.ysmed.net/kmer
  • Devine K, Hunter KH. Innovations in Education and Teaching International PhD student emotional exhaustion: the role of supportive supervision and self-presentation behaviours PhD student emotional exhaustion: the role of supportive supervision and self-presentation behaviours. InnovatIons In EducatIon and tEachIng IntErnatIonal . 2017;54(4):335-344. doi:10.1080/14703297.2016.1174143
  • Kovach H, Nancy C, Murdock L, Koetting K. Predicting Burnout and Career Choice Satisfaction in Counseling Psychology Graduate Students. The Counseling Psychologist . 2009;37:580-606. doi:10.1177/0011000008319985
  • Stubb J, Pyhältö K, Lonka K. Studies in Continuing Education Balancing between inspiration and exhaustion: PhD students’ experienced socio-psychological well-being. Published online 2011. doi:10.1080/0158037X.2010.515572
  • Galdino MJQ, Martins JT, do Carmo Fernandez Lourenço Haddad M, do Carmo Cruz Robazzi ML, Birolim MM. Burnout Syndrome among master’s and doctoral students in nursing. Acta Paulista de Enfermagem . 2016;29(1):100-106. doi:10.1590/1982-0194201600014
  • Rigg 1 J, Day 2 J, Adler 2 H, Rigg J. Emotional Exhaustion in Graduate Students: The Role of Engagement, Self-Efficacy and Social Support. Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology . 2013;3(2). doi:10.5539/jedp.v3n2p138
  • Peterson U, Bergströ G, Samuelsson M, et al. Reflecting peer-support groups in the prevention of stress and burnout: randomized controlled trial. Journal of Advanced Nursing . 2008;63(5):506-516. doi:10.1111/J.1365-2648.2008.04743.X

phd supervisor burnout

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What Is Burnout? 16 Signs and Symptoms of Excessive Stress

What is Burnout

Specifically, individuals who report experiencing burnout are:

  • 63% more likely to take a sick day
  • 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.

Employees experiencing regular burnout are also less likely to perform well. For example,

  • They are less likely to approach their superiors about how to improve their performance.
  • They’re 13% less confident in their job performance.
  • They’re almost three times more likely to leave their jobs.

How common is burnout? In a 2020 survey, Gallup reported that when asked how often participants experienced burnout:

  • 48% answered sometimes.
  • 21% answered always.

Such statistics only confirms how serious and prevalent this experience is. In this post, we will explore more about the phenomenon of burnout, what it is, and how it manifests.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Stress & Burnout Prevention Exercises (PDF) for free . These science-based exercises will equip you and those you work with, with tools to manage stress better and find a healthier balance in your life.

This Article Contains:

What is burnout & why does it happen, 16 symptoms & signs of burnout, can burnout make you physically sick, effects on life & relationships, anxiety, stress, & burnout: a vicious cycle explained, burnout vs depression, compassion fatigue: burnout in helping professions, psychological diagnosis: is burnout a disorder, best positivepsychology.com burnout prevention resources.

Many factors contribute to burnout. But first, let’s understand the definition and look at possible causes.

Defining burnout

Burnout is an occupational phenomenon where employees experience a mix of physical and psychological symptoms that result in decreased job satisfaction and productivity (Bridgeman, Bridgeman, & Barone, 2018).

Occupational burnout was first recognized in the mid-70s (Freudenberger, 1974) among healthcare professionals. Nowadays, burnout is not limited to only healthcare professionals, but can occur in any industry.

The World Health Organization (2019) defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

Causes of burnout

Burnout can occur for several reasons. However, poorly managed occupational stress has been recognized as the primary cause (Bridgeman et al., 2018; World Health Organization, 2019).

Other factors contribute to work-related stress, which in turn, contribute to burnout (Edmund, 2019; Gallup, 2020). These include the following:

Unrealistic work expectations

Unrealistic work expectations include an unmanageable workload, unrealistic deadlines, and unrealistic time pressure. Employees who are expected to perform consistently for long periods under unrealistic deadlines are more likely to experience burnout.

The number of tasks that employees are expected to complete also contributes to an unrealistic workload.

Micromanagement

Employees who feel like they have no control over their environment, tasks, or time are more likely to experience burnout.

Poor instructions

Poor instructions also includes poorly defined tasks and unclear communication from employers/managers. When employees work in environments where instructions and tasks are unclear, they are more likely to suffer from burnout.

Unclear instructions can lead to unrealistic work expectations and micromanaging because employers do not clearly explain what they expect of their employees, resulting in multiple iterations of work without an apparent end. Employees have to work hard to figure out what exactly employers expect from them, and this increases feelings of anxiety and exhaustion.

Employees benefit from socializing with their peers, and this can lead to feelings of support. Without regular contact with peers, employees may feel like they are alone.

Lack of support and unfair treatment

Employees who feel like their managers do not support them or treat them unfairly are at higher risk of burnout.

Feeling Exhausted

The original symptoms described by Freudenberg (1974) were based on what he observed among staff members at the clinic where he worked.

Since then, however, the symptoms have been further refined and are no longer limited to only health professionals.

This list of symptoms is based on what Freudenberger (1974) first observed.

The physical symptoms include:

  • Feeling exhausted
  • Unable to recover from a common cold
  • Frequent headaches
  • Frequent gastrointestinal problems
  • Sleep disturbances
  • Shortness of breath

The behaviors include:

  • Irritability
  • Heightened emotional responses (quick to cry, quick to anger)
  • Suspicious and paranoid about colleagues
  • Substance abuse
  • Stubbornness, rigid thinking, and unwillingness to listen to other people
  • Negative attitude
  • Appears depressed

Three dimensions of burnout

The symptoms of burnout commonly fall into the following three dimensions (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996; World Health Organization, 2019):

  • Feelings of exhaustion or energy depletion
  • Feeling increasingly distant/negative/cynical about one’s job
  • Reduced professional efficacy/decreased self-evaluation of output/performance

Signs of burnout

Employees who experience burnout will initially primarily complain of exhaustion. This exhaustion may be referred to as fatigue, tiredness, or feeling low on energy. It appears unshakeable. The fatigue is chronic (i.e., long term) and continuous.

Next, employees suffering from burnout will appear pessimistic about their work. Their pessimism can manifest in various ways. For example, they may adopt an overtly negative view of their work. Their pessimism can be less overt and more subtle; for example, they may appear unmotivated, disinterested, or uncommitted.

As a result, employees will report feeling despondent about their own performance and output in the workplace.

Other signs and symptoms of burnout are the side effects of overwhelming fatigue. Employees may seem disorganized, struggle to pay attention, and appear forgetful. They may come across as irritable, anxious, or depressed. They may turn to substances or medications to help them cope.

Finally, they may experience physiological symptoms because of stress, such as headaches, stomach problems, or cardiovascular problems such as a racing heart.

How symptoms manifest can differ from one person to the next. For example, some may experience restless sleep, while others may have a sore jaw from grinding their teeth.

Burnout is the result of occupational stress; if the cause of the stress is not work related, then it is unlikely to result in burnout.

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phd supervisor burnout

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People who experience burnout are also more likely to go to the doctor and the emergency room (Gallup, 2020). Some symptoms of burnout are physiological (Freudenberger, 1974). For example, employees who experience burnout report headaches, stomachaches, other gastrointestinal problems, and, sometimes, a racing heart rate.

Employees who experience burnout are also more likely to engage in substance abuse (especially alcohol). There is some evidence that burnout can affect men and women differently. Men are more likely to experience cardiovascular illnesses, whereas women are more likely to experience musculoskeletal problems (Ahola, 2007).

Stress, which is the underlying mechanism of burnout, can make you physically ill. Chronic or long-term stress can increase the risk of heart disease and infection (Kivimäki et al., 2006) and increase the risk of Type-2 diabetes and infertility (Toker, Shirom, Shapira, Berliner, & Melamed, 2005).

Stress can also result in poor-quality sleep, which can affect health by increasing the risk of heart disease and diabetes (Ayas et al., 2003). Increased levels of stress increase the body’s vulnerability to other illnesses (Kivimäki et al., 2006). Experiencing high levels of stress can prolong the time that it takes to recover from a minor ailment such as a cold (Kivimäki et al., 2006).

In very serious cases, chronic burnout increases the risk of death by 35% (Ahola, Väänänen, Koskinen, Kouvonen, & Shirom, 2010).

Burnout Effects

Remember, burnout results from occupational stress, and people who are more stressed may get involved in more conflict.

An abusive work environment can seep into family life. There is some evidence that employees who work in an abusive environment are more likely to engage in hostile behavior at home (Hoobler & Brass, 2006; Tepper, 2000).

The association between relationships and burnout is not unidirectional. Good-quality relationships can act as a buffer against burnout (Fernet, Gagné, & Austin, 2010). Positive relationships with superiors and colleagues are especially protective because they increase work motivation and job satisfaction (Fernet et al., 2010).

Occupational stress is also positively associated with relationship conflict (Friedman, Tidd, Currall, & Tsai, 2000). Specifically, employees who experienced higher levels of work-related stress also experienced higher levels of relationship conflict and higher levels of task conflict.

However, the relationship between stress and relationship conflict was moderated by the type of conflict management style that employees used.

Employees who avoided conflict were more likely to be stressed, whereas employees who tried to problem solve were less likely to feel stressed (and consequently experienced less conflict).

Burnout Prevalence: A Look at Its Rate

Freudenberger (1974) first observed burnout among healthcare professionals at clinics. Since then, a great deal of research has measured the prevalence of burnout among healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses, and psychologists.

It has long been recognized that the prevalence rate varies in the literature. These differences are due to how burnout is measured and defined. For example, prevalence rates for teachers can be as high as 30%, versus 10% for doctors and dentists (Weber & Jaekel-Reinhard, 2000).

In 2018, Rotenstein et al. authored a meta-analysis of the prevalence rate of burnout among physicians. The meta-analysis included 182 studies from 45 different countries, with a combined total of 109,628 participants.

Part of the difficulty with estimating the prevalence of burnout was that different studies used different definitions, measurements, and cut-off scores for burnout. These differences complicated the findings of the meta-analysis.

From this meta-analysis, the prevalence rate was estimated as follows:

  • In studies where burnout was defined as a notable score on only one of the three dimensions (exhaustion, depersonalization, or reduced self-evaluation), the prevalence rate ranged between 25.0% and 69.9%.
  • In studies where burnout was defined as a notable score on only two of the three dimensions, the prevalence ranged between 19.5% and 28.9%.
  • In studies where burnout was defined as a notable score on all three dimensions, the prevalence ranged between 2.6% and 11.8%.

Depression

Burnout is caused by situational factors, such as the work environment, and individual factors, such as the personality of the employee (Bühler & Land, 2003).

For example, employees who score high on measures of perfectionism and neuroticism are more likely to experience burnout (Bakker & Costa, 2014). The reason for this is that these types of employees rely on unproductive and unhelpful coping mechanisms when faced with workplace stress (Bakker & Costa, 2014).

Indeed, employees who relied on avoidant conflict resolution strategies were more likely to experience work-related stress when compared to employees who took a problem-solving approach (Friedman et al., 2000).

Furthermore, depression and burnout are correlated, and anxiety and depression are correlated. This suggests that there should be a correlation between anxiety and burnout. Employees who experience burnout do report higher levels of psychological problems such as anxiety and depression (Ahola, 2007; Peterson et al., 2008) and are more likely to rely on substance abuse (Ahola, 2007).

Corrigan, Holmes, and Luchins (1995) found evidence of a medium-sized relationship between anxiety and depression. Schonfeld and Bianchi (2016) showed that teachers who were experiencing burnout were more likely to have a history of depression and anxiety and to be currently taking antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication, respectively, than teachers who were not burned out.

Some researchers argue that people with high trait anxiety are at higher risk of developing anxiety symptoms in response to occupational stress (Koutsimani, Montgomery, & Georganta, 2019). Employees with high levels of trait anxiety are more likely to overcommit to their work and experience higher job demands, such as workload and time pressure (Mark & Smith, 2012).

In summary, people with high trait anxiety scores, high perfectionism scores, and high neuroticism experience more stress at work. This is partly because of how they respond to stress, their coping mechanisms, and how they resolve conflicts. Together, these variables increase the risk of burnout.

However, burnout itself is highly correlated with depression and anxiety and encourages poor coping behaviors such as alcohol dependence.

As a result, employees do not get the opportunity to ‘reset’ and constantly feel stressed.

Burnout vs. depression – how to tell the difference

Burnout and depression are similar.

Sometimes, people who are suffering from burnout display symptoms of depression. The difference is that the ’cause’ of the unmanaged stress that resulted in burnout is due to work, rather than the multitude of other factors that can also result in depression (Bianchi, Boffy, Hingray, Truchot, & Laurent, 2013).

So is burnout just another name for depression, but one that is limited to the workplace?

Some authors argue that the nosology of depression and burnout is unclear. The variety of symptoms and lack of clarity around the exact definition demonstrate how burnout is a hazy concept (Weber & Jaekel-Reinhard, 2000).

Bianchi et al. (2013) argue that burnout and depression should not be considered two separate psychological constructs. They showed that when comparing the symptoms between patients who experienced major depression and burned-out employees, there was little difference between these two groups. These two groups, however, both displayed higher depression scores than a control group.

The argument that the symptomatology is the same for burnout and depression has been made in later papers (Bianchi, Schonfeld, & Laurent, 2015).

The primary difference between burnout and depression is that burnout arises from occupational stress. Bianchi et al. (2015) argue, however, that it is unusual for an illness to be restricted to only one particular domain. Specifically, they argue that depression is depression, regardless of the circumstances from which it arises.

This is further complicated by the tools used to measure burnout,  since they specifically refer to the job environment rather than general daily activities.

A particular type of burnout that is often experienced by helping professionals is compassion fatigue (Figley, 2002). Compassion fatigue is prevalent among helping professionals, such as nurses and psychologists, who work with patients who are diagnosed with chronic illnesses.

Professionals who experience compassion fatigue are constantly re-exposed to the trauma and stress of a particular event but through the experiences of their clients/patients (Figley, 2002). As a result, professionals aim to be empathetic and compassionate toward their patients, while re-experiencing and re-assessing trauma through them.

Figley (2002) argues that this tension between stress and compassion leads to secondary traumatic stress, which results in compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is different, however, from countertransference or burnout.

Countertransference is when a therapist has an overly strong attachment to a client and experiences events through them as a result. It also includes over-identifying with the client.

In contrast to countertransference, compassion fatigue results from feeling empathy toward the client and their situation. The client’s situation may be a reminder of what the professional has gone through. Compassion fatigue is not because of an attachment.

As defined previously, burnout is a feeling of extreme exhaustion from poorly managed stress. In contrast with therapist burnout , compassion fatigue is more specific since it is triggered through specific traumas and experiences of specific clients. Compassion fatigue is not necessarily a blanket response to ‘work.’

Burnout disorder

The neural pathways underlying burnout have not been established, and it has similar overlapping features with depression (Freudenberger, 1974).

Most importantly, however, burnout is not recognized by the American Psychological Association as a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The World Health Organization (2019) recognizes burnout as an occupational experience, and they include it in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD code Z73.0). However, burnout is not considered a medical illness. Instead, burnout is grouped with other factors that are not illnesses or health conditions but that result in medical consultation.

phd supervisor burnout

17 Exercises To Reduce Stress & Burnout

Help your clients prevent burnout, handle stressors, and achieve a healthy, sustainable work-life balance with these 17 Stress & Burnout Prevention Exercises [PDF].

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Our free Stress & Burnout Prevention Exercises Pack features three handpicked tools from the Positive Psychology Toolkit© . These exercises can help you identify domains in which clients may be at risk of suffering from stress and burnout, as well as the potential benefits of stress for growth.

  • Energy Management Audit This brief, 16-item assessment helps clients assess their energy levels across the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains. Upon completion, clients will have gained clear insight into their energy strengths and deficits, building awareness of these energy levels’ effects on daily functioning.
  • Strengthening The Work-Private Life Barrier This exercise aims to help clients identify the behaviors, beliefs, and conditions that create metaphorical “holes” in the barrier between work and private life. In doing so, clients can better develop a solid barrier between their work and private life to help them restore a healthy balance between the two.
  • The Stress-Related Growth Scale This 50-item assessment tool assesses positive outcomes following a stressful event (i.e., stress-related growth). By reflecting on their results, clients can consider the positive benefits of challenging experiences for their relationships, thinking, and coping.

You can access these tools for free by downloading our Stress & Burnout Prevention Exercises Pack .

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others manage stress without spending hours on research and session prep, this collection contains 17 validated stress management tools for practitioners . Use them to help others identify signs of burnout and create more balance in their lives.

Besides tools, we have a wide selection of excellent articles aimed at reducing stress and improving your work environment. Here are a few suggestions as a starting point:

  • Positive Psychology in the Workplace : Thank God it’s Monday
  • Resilience in the Workplace : How to Be More Resilient at Work
  • What Is Job Crafting? (Incl. 5 Examples and Exercises)
  • Intrinsic Motivation in the Workplace : 5 Techniques to Motivate Employees
  • 16 Stress Management Activities and Worksheets to Help Clients Beat Stress

A Take-Home Message

Diagnosing burnout is not easy. It resembles other psychological illnesses such as anxiety and depression.

The challenge for clinicians is to distinguish between these syndromes.

One factor that distinguishes burnout from other illnesses is that burnout is a response to occupational stress . Therefore, clients who are currently unemployed cannot suddenly experience burnout.

With this in mind, however, the experiences of stress and depression are not limited to the workplace. For example, a stay-at-home mom can also experience stress, depression, and physical illness.

Regardless of whether the client is presenting with burnout or similar symptoms resulting from nonoccupational circumstances, the underlying mechanism – stress – can have very serious consequences.

Learning to recognize the symptoms of stress can better protect employees and clients before it becomes unmanageable and unhealthy.

To do so, use the tools provided and browse through our positive psychology articles to give your clients the help they need.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Stress & Burnout Prevention Exercises (PDF) for free .

  • Ahola, K. (2007). Occupational burnout and health (Doctoral dissertation). University of Helsinki, Finland.
  • Ahola, K., Väänänen, A., Koskinen, A., Kouvonen, A., & Shirom, A. (2010). Burnout as a predictor of all-cause mortality among industrial employees: a 10-year prospective register-linkage study. Journal of Psychosomatic Research , 69 (1), 51–57.
  • Ayas, N. T., White, D. P., Al-Delaimy, W. K., Manson, J. E., Stampfer, M. J., Speizer, F. E., …  Hu, F. B. (2003). A prospective study of self-reported sleep duration and incident diabetes in women. Diabetes Care , 26 (2), 380–384.
  • Bakker, A. B., & Costa, P. L. (2014). Chronic job burnout and daily functioning: A theoretical analysis. Burnout Research , 1 (3), 112–119.
  • Bianchi, R., Boffy, C., Hingray, C., Truchot, D., & Laurent, E. (2013). Comparative symptomatology of burnout and depression. Journal of Health Psychology , 18 (6), 782–787.
  • Bianchi, R., Schonfeld, I. S., & Laurent, E. (2015). Is it time to consider the “burnout syndrome” a distinct illness? Frontiers in Public Health , 3 , 158.
  • Bridgeman, P. J., Bridgeman, M. B., & Barone, J. (2018). Burnout syndrome among healthcare professionals. The Bulletin of the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists , 75 (3), 147–152.
  • Bühler, K. E., & Land, T. (2003). Burnout and personality in intensive care: an empirical study. Hospital Topics , 81 (4), 5–12.
  • Corrigan, P. W., Holmes, E. P., & Luchins, D. (1995). Burnout and collegial support in state psychiatric hospital staff. Journal of Clinical Psychology , 51 (5), 703–710.
  • De Dreu, C. K., Van Dierendonck, D., & Dijkstra, M. T. (2004). Conflict at work and individual well-being. International Journal of Conflict Management , 15 (1), 6–26.
  • Edmund, M. (Ed.) (2019) Beating burnout. Quality Progress , 52 (11), 10–12.
  • Fernet, C., Gagné, M., & Austin, S. (2010). When does quality of relationships with coworkers predict burnout over time? The moderating role of work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior , 31 (8), 1163–1180.
  • Figley, C. R. (2002). Compassion fatigue: Psychotherapists’ chronic lack of self care. Journal of Clinical Psychology , 58 (11), 1433–1441.
  • Friedman, R. A., Tidd, S. T., Currall, S. C., & Tsai, J. C. (2000). What goes around comes around: The impact of personal conflict style on work conflict and stress. International Journal of Conflict Management , 11 (1), 32–55.
  • Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). Staff burn-out. Journal of Social Issues , 30 (1), 159–165.
  • Gallup (2020). Gallup’s perspective on employee burnout: Causes and cures. Gallup . Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/282659/employee-burnout-perspective-paper.aspx
  • Hoobler, J. M., & Brass, D. J. (2006). Abusive supervision and family undermining as displaced aggression. Journal of Applied Psychology , 91 (5), 1125–1133.
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Mamo

This is noot justinteresting; instead it’s vital to know what affects us in the work place. Thank you for sharing these thoughts

Shelton Kartun B.Sc(Hons) DMS ADS - Stress Counsellor

A good overview of burnout in the workplace; however I have several patients presenting with domestic burnout, which was not alluded to. This is my term but includes burnout from juggling too many things day in, day out, without any break such as managing children, supporting a wife and running the household. For example, an exhausted husband comes home and has to attend to all the kids chores like homework, bathing, spending time with them, getting them ready for bed, fitting in cooking supper, going to the shops, giving his wife some time, sorting out finances or problems in the house etc. This continuous non-stop activity can lead to burn out, fatigue and breakdown as well as occupational burnout.

Jennifer

Many women especially single moms experience exactly the same issues outlined above. When feeling stretched in what feels like a million and one directions … it’s crucial to make time for joy. Having supportive friends .. therapist.. pets .. getting fresh air .. a good meal ..creative projects are essential to restoration of mental well-being.. Making a list of “to-do’s” is helpful but doesn’t have to be accomplished in one day. These are meant as a reminder ..and if the deadline isn’t met “so be it”..I find that contacting the person or source (hard , I know) that your late in responding has been helpful in reducing stress/anxiety. Most importantly, don’t beat yourself up and know your trying and doing your best!!

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Study Engagement and Burnout of the PhD Candidates in Medicine: A Person-Centered Approach

Lotta tikkanen.

1 Centre for University Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

2 School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education, Philosophical Faculty, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

Kirsi Pyhältö

3 Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

Aleksandra Bujacz

4 Behavioral Informatics Team, Health Informatics Centre, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management, and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Juha Nieminen

5 Department of Learning, Informatics, Management, and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Associated Data

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

This study focused on exploring individual variations in doctoral candidates’ well-being, in terms of experienced research engagement and burnout by using a person-centered approach. In addition, the associations between well-being profiles and gender, country of origin, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status and drop-out intentions were explored. The participants were 692 PhD candidates in the field of medicine. Latent profile analysis was employed to identify the well-being profiles. Four distinct profiles were identified: high engagement–low burnout, high engagement–moderate burnout, moderate engagement–moderate burnout , and moderate engagement–high burnout. Working in a clinical unit or hospital and working in a research group seemed to be related to increased engagement and reduced risk for suffering burnout, while the intentions to quit one’s doctoral studies were more frequently reported in profiles with moderate levels of engagement. The findings imply that although a significant number of PhD candidates in medicine had an increased risk for developing burnout, for most of the PhD candidates research education is an engaging experience.

Introduction

Undertaking a doctoral degree provides both highs and lows, potentially significantly reducing or increasing PhD candidates’ well-being (e.g., Stubb et al., 2011 ; Divaris et al., 2012 ; Caesens et al., 2014 ; Hunter and Devine, 2016 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ). Yet, previous research on the topic has focused heavily on the negative attributes such as stress (e.g., Oswalt and Riddock, 2007 ; Pappa et al., 2020 ), depression (e.g. Peluso et al., 2011 ; Levecque et al., 2017 ), anxiety (e.g., Barry et al., 2018 ; Liu et al., 2019 ), and exhaustion (e.g., Hunter and Devine, 2016 ), while positive aspects of PhD experience have been studied to a lesser extent ( Barnes and Randall, 2012 ; Sverdlik et al., 2018 ; Pyhältö et al., 2019 ). In particular, the number of studies exploring the combination or co-existence of positive and negative attributes of PhD candidates’ well-being is limited (for an exception, see Stubb et al., 2011 ), although PhD candidate’s well-being cannot be reduced simply to an absence of negative experiences ( Schmidt and Hansson, 2018 ).

A large body of research has indicated that the risk of burnout among physicians and other health care workers is high ( van Vendeloo et al., 2018 ; Dyrbye et al., 2020 ; Woo et al., 2020 ). The COVID-19-pandemic has further increased the risk of burnout among health care workers ( Chirico et al., 2021 ; Magnavita et al., 2021 ). In contrast, we know little about the well-being of research-active employees in the medical fields. Based on the literature on doctoral education, PhD candidates working in the medical context have rarely been studied. The medical research context is affected by the culture and hierarchy of the wider organizational culture of health care and hospital hierarchy, likely affecting PhD candidates’ well-being ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, there are at least two distinct subgroups of PhD students in these contexts ( Naylor et al., 2016 ): those who also work clinically and those working in the basic sciences. These two groups of PhD candidates often work under very different conditions, within the same medical university setting ( Naylor et al., 2016 ). More context-specific studies into PhD candidates in medical research education and the differing subgroups of PhD candidates in medicine have been called for ( Naylor et al., 2016 ; Kusurkar et al., 2021 ).

In this study, we aimed to explore the individual variation in well-being among PhD candidates in medicine by employing a person-centered approach. We focused on identifying burnout-engagement profiles employed by PhD candidates in the medical fields, and how they are related to working in a clinical unit or hospital, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status, and drop-out intentions. Also, differences between international and native (Swedish) PhDs candidates, and men and women were examined.

PhD Candidates’ Well-Being

PhD candidates’ study well-being is a multidimensional construct referring to a combination of positive mental states, such as satisfaction, self-efficacy or/and study engagement, and absence of extensive and severe negative ones such as burnout or strain related to doctoral studies, further contributing to a candidates ability to pursue their study goals ( Korhonen et al., 2014 ; Widlund et al., 2018 ). Study well-being is constructed in an interplay between demands and resources of the PhD. candidate and their doctoral study environment (see on study well-being among undergraduates Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2014 ). In this study, we explore PhD. candidates’ study well-being in terms of study engagement and burnout. It has been suggested that s tudy engagement is a symbol of an optimal PhD experience, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption ( Schaufeli et al., 2002b ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ). Among PhD candidates, engagement is typically manifested as high levels of energy and mental resilience while working with one’s doctoral research, a strong willingness to invest effort in the doctorate, a sense of significance, enthusiasm, and inspiration, and being fully focused on one’s work, whereby time passes quickly ( Virtanen and Pyhältö, 2012 ; Vekkaila et al., 2013 , 2014 ). Engagement in doctoral study has been shown to be positively related to study progress and negatively to drop-out intentions ( Castelló et al., 2016 ).

Study burnout , in turn, refers to a negative study experience that is characterized by two core symptoms, exhaustion and cynicism, resulting from prolonged stress ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; Salmela-Aro et al., 2009 ). Exhaustion refers to lack of emotional energy and chronic fatigue ( Maslach and Jackson, 1981 ), and cynicism refers to alienation from one’s studying, perceiving them as meaningless and losing interest in them ( Maslach, 2003 ). Burnout during doctoral study has been shown to be related to delaying doctoral study and intending to quit them ( Pyhältö et al., 2012 ; Anttila et al., 2015 ; Hunter and Devine, 2016 ; Cornér et al., 2017 ; Barry et al., 2018 ).

In variable-based studies, study engagement and burnout have typically been found to be negatively related to each other ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; González-Romá et al., 2006 ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ). This means that the PhD candidates experiencing high levels of study engagement are likely to experience low levels of study burnout and vice versa. However, various combinations of study engagement and burnout are also possible ( Tuominen-Soini and Salmela-Aro, 2014 ; Salmela-Aro and Read, 2017 ). For example, a PhD candidate can be highly engaged in their doctorate, but simultaneously experience high levels of exhaustion. A reason for this might the gradual development of burnout: burnout typically begins with exhaustion, and then, if working conditions remain the same, also the levels of cynicism increase ( Maslach and Leiter, 2016 ). Studies using a person-centered approach to explore PhD candidates’ study engagement and burnout simultaneously are scarce, resulting in a lack of knowledge about individual variations in the study well-being of PhD candidates in medicine. In addition, it is not known how different study well-being profiles are related to individual and contextual factors.

Antecedents of PhD Students’ Study Well-Being

Research has identified several individual and contextual antecedents of PhD candidates’ well-being. For instance, gender has been shown to be associated with study well-being, yet the evidence is mixed: although there is some evidence showing that female PhD students experience more stress and exhaustion than males ( Toews et al., 1997 ; McAlpine et al., 2020 ), there is also evidence of male postgraduates being more likely to experience increased levels of exhaustion than their female colleagues. Hunter and Devine (2016) , on the other hand, showed that PhD students’ gender was not associated with their experiences of exhaustion. The mixed findings imply that gendered impact may be dependent on the socio-cultural or disciplinary practices.

Some differences between international and native PhD candidates have also been reported. It has also been suggested that international PhD candidates are more career-oriented and more satisfied with their doctoral studies, which might make them more likely to experience research engagement compared to native PhD candidates ( Harman, 2003 ; Sakurai et al., 2017 ). However, international PhD candidates have also been shown to experience stress due to a lack of a supportive network ( Pappa et al., 2020 ), which increases their risk of burnout. Yet, evidence concerning the differences between domestic and international PhD candidates’ well-being is particularly limited.

Working conditions can be expected to have an impact on the well-being of PhD candidates in the medical fields. First, it has been suggested that the PhD candidates who are involved in clinical work experience high work strain due to constant balancing with their clinical or patient responsibilities and PhD research ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ), which makes them prone to burnout experiences. On the other hand, there is also evidence that real work-life experiences such as clinical work can inspire candidates in their doctoral studies, and thus contribute to increased engagement (see Vekkaila et al., 2013 ). In a qualitative case study, comparing clinically active and basic science PhD candidates in the same context, Naylor and others (2016) showed that clinical doctoral candidates were initially less competent in basic research skills than candidates who had learned these skills at earlier stages of their basic science education. An adjustment from an established position at the clinic to being a junior researcher in the laboratory was challenging. On the other hand, financial stress characterized the experience of the science candidates more than that of the clinicians. Clinical PhD candidates also saw research education as being more clearly connected to career opportunities in the future than their basic science counterparts in the same setting did. Perceived employment opportunities have been associated with lower burnout levels in biomedical PhD candidates ( Nagy et al., 2019 ). Differences in the working conditions of medical PhD candidates may thus affect the levels of burnout and engagement in differing ways.

Research group status, i.e., whether the PhD candidate is undertaking their doctoral research within a research group or alone, can be assumed to have impact on study well-being. Research group has been shown to be an important source of social support to PhD candidates, and hence, working in a research group can be assumed to increase the experienced engagement ( Stubb et al., 2011 ; Peltonen et al., 2017 ). However, it has also been found that working within a research group can be a source of stress ( Stubb et al., 2011 ). Moreover, study status, i.e., whether the PhD candidate is undertaking their degree part-time vs. full-time, may have an impact on their study well-being. Yet, the evidence in this regard is partly contradictory. While those who work full-time are shown to be more satisfied with their supervision and perceive the scholarly community as empowering compared to those who work part-time ( Stubb et al., 2011 ; Pyhältö et al., 2016 ), candidates working part-time are shown to be more satisfied with their mental health and friendships ( Isohätälä et al., 2017 ).

Aim of the Study

The aim of the study was to understand the individual differences in study well-being among PhD candidates in medicine. More specifically, we explored the PhD candidates’ study engagement–burnout profiles and their associations with background variables that have previously shown to be associated with PhD candidates’ well-being [i.e., gender, country of origin, and study status (i.e., whether they were completing their doctorate full-time or part-time], and research group status). We also explored whether PhD candidates classified into different study well-being profiles differed in their intensions to drop out from doctoral studies. The following general hypotheses were formulated:

H1 : Different study engagement–burnout profiles can be detected among PhD candidates in medicine, ranging from profiles with high levels of burnout and low levels of engagement to profiles with low levels of burnout and high levels of engagement. H2 : The PhD candidates in the different study well-being profiles differ from each other in terms of gender, country of origin (i.e., domestic/international), and whether they are completing their doctorate full-time or part-time, and whether they work in hospital/clinical unit or not, and whether they worked with their doctorate alone or as a part of a research group (i.e., research group status). H3 : The PhD candidates with different study well-being profiles differ in their intentions to quit the doctoral studying, i.e., the students with high levels of burnout and low level of engagement are more likely to consider dropping out from the doctorate than those with low levels of burnout and high levels of engagement.

Materials and Methods

Research context.

This study had a cross-sectional design. The data were collected during 2015–2016 through a web-based survey using a secure platform (Artologik). The survey was conducted in English. All PhD candidates at Karolinska Institutet with an activity rate of more than 10% 1 received an invitation to participate in the survey. Karolinska Institutet is a research-oriented medical university with more than 2000 PhD candidates enrolled. “Medical” is understood as an umbrella term encompassing a wide array of fields with a connection to medicine: From clinical research to a wide variety of basic research topics in microbiological and life sciences. Several allied health sciences, behavioral and medical social sciences, such as nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychology, medical ethics, and management are also represented.

All participants were enrolled in the same university-wide research education program and have the same overall formal requirements for their training, regarding the number of credits required from research education courses, general criteria for quality of research work, and basic structures of supervision and quality control of the research education process. However, within that universal organizational framework there is great variation in terms of the topics investigated, practices of individual research groups and supervisors and departmental structures.

There are clinical and basic science PhD candidates at Karolinska Institutet. The clinical PhD candidates typically work within two organizations: The hospital clinic or another health care organization (the manager or supervisor of the clinical work being the person the clinician reports to) and another one in the research group on the university side (the main doctoral supervisor most often being the candidate’s responsible manager). The basic science PhD candidates only work within one organization, the university, and have their main supervisor in doctoral education.

In Sweden, all PhD candidates are fully financed, meaning that they get a monthly salary. Their salary level depends on a variety of factors, mainly the source of finance (for example, grants from abroad, external competitive research funding, research funding from medical industry, or funding provided by the healthcare system for their employees). Clinical PhD candidates typically have considerably higher salaries than their basic science counterparts.

The context of the current study is similar to many other natural science contexts in that much of the research work is done within a research group, and a collaborative “teamwork research training structure” ( Chiang, 2003 ) is prevalent. However, there is considerable variation in this regard. At least two co-supervisors in addition to a main supervisor is an organizational norm.

Participants

In total, 2044 PhD candidates were invited and 692 responded to the survey (response rate 34%). PhD candidates were all in the medical fields. Of the participants, 61.3% were females and 36.6% males. The age of the participants ranged from 24 to 88, the mean being 35years. Forty six percent of the participants ( n =320) were Swedish and 53% ( n =366) were from another country. Of the participants, 67.2% ( n =465) reported that they were completing their doctorate full-time and 32.7% part-time. Nearly one-third (32.7%, n =226) of the participants were working in a hospital or a clinical unit. The proportion of those working mainly on their own with their doctorate was 54.8% ( n =379), and 44.4% ( n =307) of the participants reported that they were working in a research team.

Participants were informed that participation was completely voluntary and that they may withdraw from the study at any time without providing any explanation. They were also informed that all of the data which they provided would be strictly anonymous and treated confidentially, responses to the survey would not be linked to any other personal data and that analyses would be made at the group level. Before completing the survey, participants indicated that they had read and understood the information provided above and whether they agreed to participate in the study. The research was approved by the Swedish Central Ethical Review Board (Ref. No#2015/1626-31/5).

The participants completed the cross-country doctoral experience (C-DES) survey (see C-DES manual Pyhältö et al., 2018 ; Castelló et al., 2018 ). In this study, we used the following C-DES-scales to study PhD students’ study well-being: (1) research engagement (5 items) and (2) burnout in studying consisting of two factors: (a) exhaustion (4 items) and (b) cynicism (5 items). All items were rated on seven-point scales (1=not at all, 2=very rarely, 3=rarely, 4=sometimes, 5=often, 6=very often, 7=all the time; See Appendix 1 for the items). Mean variables were formed to represent research engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism in studying. The Cronbach alpha reliability and descriptive statistics of the subscales are shown in Table 1 .

Descriptive statistics and correlations of the study variables.

Data Analyses

A latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to identify subgroups of individuals based on their experiences of study engagement and burnout. LPA is a person-centered approach that involves grouping individuals into latent classes based on their observed response patterns on specific variables instead of exploring the relationships between the variables ( Berlin et al., 2014 ). LPA provides statistical criteria for model comparisons in selecting the best-fitting number of latent classes and opportunity to include predictors and outcomes compared to other clustering approaches (e.g., Vermunt and Magidson, 2002 ; Morin et al., 2018 ). The analyses were carried out using Mplus version 8.6 and MLR estimator that produces maximum likelihood estimates with standard errors and χ 2 test statistics that are robust to non-normality ( Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2017 ). Within-class variances were held constant across classes. We used several statistical criteria to choose the best fitting model: The Akaike (AIC), the Bayesian (BIC), adjusted Bayesian (aBIC) information-based measures of fit, and a Vuong-Lo-Mendell-Rubin (VLMR) and Lo-Mendell-Rubin (aLRT), and bootstrapped (BLRT) likelihood ratio tests ( Nylund et al., 2007 ; Berlin et al., 2014 ). In addition, the theoretical meaningfulness of the profile solution was emphasized in selecting the number of profiles. The average latent class probabilities and entropy values were used to evaluate the clarity of different profile solutions.

To explore whether the PhD candidates with different study well-being profiles differed from each other in terms of background variables (gender, country of origin, working in clinical unit or hospital, study status (full-time or part-time), research group status), we used auxiliary Mplus command ( Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2017 ). The background variables were included as antecedents of the latent class variable while accounting for the measurement error in classification ( Asparouhov and Muthén, 2014 ). This analysis was carried out with the R3STEP procedure of Mplus that performs a multinomial logistic regression and provides the odds ratios describing the effect of background variables on the likelihood of membership in each of the latent profiles compared to other profiles ( McLarnon and O’Neill, 2018 ). DCAT procedure for Mplus was used for examining whether candidates in different profiles differed from each other in terms of their intentions to quit studying for their doctorate.

The Study Well-Being Profiles

LPAs were run with 1–6 classes ( Table 2 ). According to VLMR and aLRT likelihood ratio tests, adding a subsequent class increased the model fit all the way to six classes, while the information criteria (AIC, BIC, and aBIC) showed that adding a new latent profile enhanced the model fit all the way to five profiles. However, the elbow plot ( Figure 1 ) showed that the BIC and aBIC values clearly decreased from one to four profiles, after which the decline levelled off. Therefore, the four-profile solution was selected. The four-profile solution was also considered to be the most parsimonious model, had a clear theoretical interpretation, and included profiles with sufficiently large memberships (i.e., >5% of the cases). The entropy value (0.80) and latent class probabilities (>0.80) also showed sufficient separation between the profiles in the four-profile solution showed sufficient separation between the profiles.

Information criteria values for different profile solutions in LPAs.

LogL , log likelihood value; nf , number of free parameters; AIC , Akaike information criterion; BIC , Bayesian information criterion; aBIC, adjusted Bayesian information criterion; VLMR, VuongLo-Mendell–Rubin likelihood ratio test; aLRT, Lo-Mendell-Rubin adjusted likelihood ratio test; BLRT , bootstrapped likelihood ratio test. The selected model is in boldface .

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Object name is fpsyg-12-727746-g001.jpg

Elbow plot of information criteria for different profile solutions.

Four well-being profiles were identified ( Figure 2 ). The first study well-being profile was high engagement–low burnout profile (see Table 3 ). It was the second most common profile among the participants with a 32.7 percent share ( n =226). The PhD candidates in this profile reported rather high levels of study engagement meaning that they often felt enthusiastic and inspired by their doctoral work. They reported low levels of cynicism, but moderate levels of exhaustion. However, when compared to other profiles, the exhaustion levels were lowest in this profile.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is fpsyg-12-727746-g002.jpg

Study well-being profiles of the PhD candidates in medicine.

Profile means and standard deviations.

The second profile was high engagement–moderate burnout profile, and it was the most common profile among the participants with a 33.2 percent share ( n =230). The PhD candidates within this profile reported moderate levels of both exhaustion and cynicism, and high levels of study engagement. The third profile was moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile. It represented 25.1 percent of the participants ( n =174). The PhD candidates with this profile demonstrated moderate levels of study engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism. This means that although the PhD candidates within this profile felt rather inspired and enthusiastic about their doctoral studies, they also sometimes felt overwhelmed by the doctoral study related workload and perceived their doctoral studies as meaningless. The fourth profile was moderate engagement–high burnout profile. The PhD candidates with this profile reported high levels of both exhaustion and cynicism. The candidates’ high levels of study burnout were combined with moderate levels of study engagement. This profile represented 9.0 percent of the participants ( n =62) being the least common profile.

The profiles differed statistically significantly ( p <0.01) from each other in all study variables, research engagement, exhaustion, and cynicism.

The Antecedents of Study Well-Being Profiles

Gender and country of origin did not have statistically significant relationships with study well-being profiles. Whether the PhD candidates were completing their doctorate full-time or part-time did not predict the profile membership either.

The PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctoral thesis had higher odds of belonging to moderate engagement–high burnout profile than to high engagement–moderate burnout profile ( b =0.98, SE=0.38, p =0.011, OR=2.86, 95%CI[1.25–5.64]) or high engagement–low burnout profile ( b =1.35, SE=0.38, p <0.001, OR=4.22, 95%CI[1.83–8.11]) compared to those who were completing their doctorate in a research group. In addition, the PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctorate had higher odds of belonging to the moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile than to the high engagement—low burnout profile ( b =0.83, SE=0.25, p =0.001, OR=2.28, 95%CI[1.39–3.75]) compared to those working in research groups.

The PhD candidates who were working in a clinical unit or hospital had higher odds of belonging to high engagement–low burnout profile than to moderate burnout–moderate engagement ( b =0.61, SE=0.29, p =0.037, OR = 1.85, 95%CI[1.04–3.25]) or moderate engagement–high burnout ( b =1.30, SE=0.52, p =0.012, OR=3.56, 95%CI[1.30–9.72]) profiles compared to those who reported that they were not working in a clinical unit or hospital. Those working in hospital or clinical unit also had higher odds of belonging to high engagement–moderate burnout ( b =1.23, SE=0.50, p =0.015, OR=3.66, 95%CI[1.33–10.10]) profile than to moderate engagement–high burnout profile than those who were not working in a clinical unit or hospital.

Taken together, the PhD candidates who reported that they were working alone with their doctorate had higher odds of belonging to profiles displaying lower levels of engagement and higher levels of burnout compared to those working in a research group. In turn, the PhD candidates who reported working in a clinical unit or hospital had higher odds of belonging to profiles displaying higher levels of engagement and lower levels of burnout compared to those who were not at a clinical unit or hospital.

Differences Between PhD Candidates in Different Profiles in Their Dropout Intentions

The PhD candidates in various profiles differed statistically significantly from each other in terms of their dropout intentions [ χ 2 (3, N =690)=147.6, p <0.001]. The intentions to interrupt one’s doctoral studies were most frequently reported in the following profiles: moderate engagement–high burnout profile (74.7%) of the PhD candidates with this profile had considered dropping out) and moderate engagement–moderate burnout profile (53.4%). However, the candidates with profiles characterized by high study engagement reported less intentions to interrupt their doctoral studies: 7.2% of the PhD candidates with high engagement–low burnout profile and 16.6% with the high engagement–moderate burnout profile had considered dropping out.

Findings in the Light of the Literature

In this study, we explored PhD candidates’ research engagement–burnout profiles. Adopting a person-centered approach allowed us to explore individual variation in PhD candidates’ study well-being by considering both positive and negative attributes of well-being at the same time rather than concentrating on the negative ones which has been the focus of several previous studies (e.g., Oswalt and Riddock, 2007 ; Peluso et al., 2011 ; Levecque et al., 2017 ; Pappa et al., 2020 ). Four distinct profiles among the PhD candidates in the field of medicine were identified: high engagement–low burnout, high engagement–moderate burnout, moderate engagement–moderate burnout, and moderate engagement–high burnout. The person-oriented approach complements variable-based studies showing a negative association between engagement and burnout ( Schaufeli et al., 2002a ; González-Romá et al., 2006 ; Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya, 2012 ; Swords and Ellis, 2017 ) by indicating that there are individual differences in how exhaustion, cynicism, and engagement can combine within a person. Our findings supported the bivariant approach on burnout and engagement, positing that burnout and engagement present two distinct, yet related dimensions of the individual’s affective study related experiences ( Shraga and Shirom, 2009 ; Larsen and McGraw, 2011 ; Shirom, 2011 ).

The results showed that the levels of research engagement were high or moderate in all the profiles and the most common profiles were those displaying high levels of engagement. Thus, the results indicate that undertaking doctoral studies in the field of medicine is a highly engaging experience. However, the results also showed that the risk of experiencing study burnout was also elevated (i.e., moderate or high) among most of the PhD candidates. These results are in line with earlier findings ( Kusurkar et al., 2021 ) suggesting an increased risk of burnout in medical researcher education.

The results also showed that those PhD candidates who reported working alone with their doctoral studying were more likely to belong to the profiles displaying moderate levels of engagement and higher levels of burnout. This implies that engaging in researcher group provides a potential resource for cultivating not only study progress but also the candidate’s well-being, identified also in previous studies ( Pyhältö et al., 2009 ; Stubb et al., 2011 ; Peltonen et al., 2017 ). Interestingly, although medicine presents typical group-based discipline, i.e., the basic unit for conducting research is a research group providing the platform for researcher education, according to our results only about half of the candidates reported that they were engaged in a research group. This implies that formal research group structure does not automatically guarantee an experience of membership or a well-functioning collaboration with the research group.

The results showed that the PhD candidates who were working in a hospital or clinical unit had lower risk of experiencing burnout and were more likely to experience high levels of study engagement than others. This means that undertaking one’s doctoral degree when having clinical responsibilities might protect the PhD candidates from study burnout and support their study engagement. On the contrary, Kusurkar et al. (2021) found that candidates in clinical departments had lower autonomy and higher levels of conflict between work responsibilities, especially among those PhD candidates who were working with patients. A variety of factors may explain our finding. The relevance of the research itself and doctoral studies in general might become apparent in the clinical work and hence, be a source of research engagement (see also Vekkaila et al., 2013 ). On the other hand, the candidates engaging in clinical work might have more extensive support networks to draw from as a resource for their studying and recovery when needed. They might be also less stressed by their career prospects after completing the PhD degree or they might be aiming for a non-academic career to reduce the stress caused by the doctoral studies (see Nagy et al., 2019 ). In addition, financial security may explain the differences in burnout levels: Clinical PhD candidates typically receive a much higher salary than PhD candidates who do not have clinical training or employment. In addition, basic science researchers will typically rely on external, competitive funding not only for the research work itself but even for maintaining a position at the university, thereby having much lower job security than their clinically active counterparts, who always have the chance of increasing the proportion of clinical work, should funding for research be scarce.

International PhD candidates did not differ in their likelihood of belonging to any subgroup. As previous studies have suggested that although international students might be prone to experience stress ( Pappa et al., 2020 ), they are also likely to be motivated and satisfied with their studying ( Harman, 2003 ; Sakurai et al., 2017 ), and thus be likely to experience research engagement. To our knowledge, no earlier study has looked at engagement and burnout of international doctoral students specifically in the medical research education, a context that tends to be extremely international and intercultural. Based on this finding, it seems that there were no distinctive differences between the international and native PhD candidates regard to their engagement-burnout-profiles. Accordingly, this suggests that the international PhD candidates in the field of medicine are highly heterogeneous group in terms of study well-being, not primarily determined by their status as international students. For example, it might be that whether they experienced working alone or within a research group or were clinical vs. basic science medical PhD candidates, were more significant in terms of their well-being than being an international PhD student.

The PhD candidates within the profiles displaying moderate levels of engagement and moderate or high levels of burnout symptoms more often reported intention to quit the doctoral degree than those with high levels of engagement, which was in line with previous findings ( Anttila et al., 2015 ; Cornér et al., 2017 ). Hence, in addition to having mental health benefits, high levels of experienced engagement are related to study progress among PhD candidates in the field of medicine. Accordingly, investing in developing engaging doctoral education environments has potentially significant individual and organizational benefits, considering that according to previous studies, drop-out rates among the PhD candidates typically range from 25 to 60% (e.g., Council of Graduate Schools, 2004 ; Golde, 2005 ; McAlpine and Norton, 2006 ; Gardner, 2009 ).

Limitations of the Study

There are some methodological limitations in the study that need to be considered when interpreting the results. First, the criteria for selecting the number of profiles were ambiguous ( Nylund et al., 2007 ), and hence, further studies exploring whether similar profiles can be found among other groups of PhD candidates are needed. For example, models for how profiles can be reproduced in new samples are being developed and may be helpful in exploring the well-being of PhD candidates across different medical research contexts (e.g., Gillet et al., 2021 ). Second, it is important to note that due to cross-sectional design, causal or process-related conclusions between study well-being and dropping out cannot be drawn. Third, the survey was sent to all doctoral students at the university simultaneously. Although the number of students who responded is sufficient for the analyses conducted, the sample only represents 36% of all doctoral students enrolled in the program. This should be kept in mind when generalizing, as we do not know whether self-selection might have affected the results. Fourth, the study was carried out in a specific social-cultural country context and in health sciences, accordingly one should be careful in drawing conclusions based on the results, across the doctoral education systems or disciplines. Last, it is important to note that data were collected before the COVID-19-pandemic. The pandemic has affected both the clinical and basic-science doctoral students in many ways. Further studies are needed to explore how stress, engagement and well-being of doctoral students working in the medical context have been affected by the pandemic at its different phases and afterwards.

Undertaking a PhD in medical fields is an engaging experience for most of the PhD candidates. However, the results suggested that there are several PhD candidates with high or increased risk of burnout. Thus, it seems that individual differences occur between PhD candidates in terms of their well-being. For individuβals displaying a higher risk of burnout, it was more common to experience studying alone in their PhD compared to those with lower burnout risk. In addition, the lower risk of burnout was related to working in a clinical unit or hospital. Therefore, it can be concluded that in the field of medicine, working in research group, and in a clinical unit or hospital during their PhD can help buffering study burnout and provide sources of research engagement.

Practical Implications

The results of the present study can be used by educational developers and staff trainers working with doctoral education. The stressors experienced by basic science PhD candidates in the highly competitive, externally funded research universities need to be taken into consideration by supervisors and policymakers. Particular attention should be paid to the candidates who experience that they are studying alone. Supervisors should be encouraged to be particularly careful in mapping out the actual support networks of their PhD candidates, instead of just formal connections to officially defined research groups. Moreover, the similarities and differences between the conditions of the clinical and non-clinical PhD candidates are worth discussing, as they work in the same general setting. The positive news for medical universities is that despite the pressures and competing responsibilities, the medical research setting is often experienced as engaging and does not automatically lead to burnout, a message worth spreading in this community engaged with cutting-edge, life-saving academic research. The study also has implications for policymakers: the findings highlight the importance of surveillance of the occupational health within the hospitals to check the psychosocial risk factors for staff undergoing research education, not merely that of residents and other health care workers.

The results also provide directions for future research on PhD candidates’ well-being. Our findings suggested that although an official membership in a research group is common in medical university, over half of the participants in this study reported that they were working alone. Working alone instead of within a research group was more common in profiles with higher burnout levels and lower levels of engagement. Therefore, reasons for the finding that most of the participants experienced working alone needs to be studied further. For example, investigation is needed to see if working alone is an active choice of a candidate or whether it represents a failure of the research education system in ensuring a supportive setting for doctoral students. In such further investigations, special attention should be paid to the actual networks, communities of practice and support. Also, factors involved in medical doctoral students’ engagement and burnout warrant closer investigation. As engagement may be more of a day-to-day experience, while burnout takes more time to develop ( Sonnentag, 2017 ), it might be useful to look more closely at the sources of engagement for both the clinically active and the basic science subgroups of medical PhD candidates, both to identify them more precisely and to investigate the variability and trajectory of them. Given the highly competitive, high-pressure nature of research-oriented medical contexts, it might also be useful to look at experiences of exhaustion as separate from fully developed burnout, as recent research indicates that weariness does not necessarily develop into more serious burnout ( Gustavsson et al., 2010 ; Gillet et al., 2021 ). For PhD candidates, supervisors, and decision-makers in these competitive environments, where high workload is more the norm than the exception, a more detailed understanding of these processes would be invaluable in terms of identifying high-risk situations and individuals in urgent need of help.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The research was approved by the Swedish Central Ethical Review Board (Ref. No#2015/1626-31/5). The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

LT, KP, AB, and JN have contributed to writing the original draft and editing it. AB has contributed to data collection and project administration. LT has contributed to conducting the analyses. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1 Time devoted to a thesis is more than 4 h/week.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727746/full#supplementary-material

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  • CAREER FEATURE
  • 07 March 2024

Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout

  • Jyoti Madhusoodanan 0

Jyoti Madhusoodanan is a science writer in Portland, Oregon.

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Megan Majocha signing next to a microscope in the lab

Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology researcher in the laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says Deaf researchers shouldn’t have to spend time developing sign language for their science. Credit: NIH

Sign language in science

The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education and research careers inaccessible for deaf people and those with hearing loss. Meet the scientists, sign-language specialists and students working to add scientific terms and concepts to sign languages. In the third of four articles showcasing their efforts, Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology PhD student at Georgetown University in Washington DC, who is part of the Georgetown–National Institutes of Health Graduate Partnerships Program, describes how she worked with interpreters to develop the signed scientific lexicon necessary to conduct her research.

I am from a third-generation Deaf family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to a primary school for Deaf children and then to a mainstream secondary school at the age of 12. My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to learn how to work with interpreters in the mainstream, hearing world while I was at school, so that I had exposure to both worlds.

I worked with the same interpreter for six years from grade 7 (age 12) until the end of secondary school. We collaborated to develop signs for scientific terms — asking each other, “Would this sign make sense for this specific term,” and that kind of thing. It was a lot of work for me in my early teens, to try to develop these scientific signs as well as learning the subject content.

I started my PhD in August 2019 at Georgetown University in Washington DC. I am in my fifth year and I expect to defend my thesis in the next few months. Speaking to a few other Deaf scientists during my PhD, I learnt that we all have different signs for scientific terms: even though they have the same meaning in English, we all sign them differently because we have all developed our own separate ways of signing terms that aren’t in the American Sign Language (ASL) dictionary.

I had to develop my own team of interpreters for my first-year graduate school courses. They worked with me Monday to Friday for each course I took and in the laboratory. It is beneficial to have that consistency for both me and my interpreting team, because we can develop signs together and the interpreters can become familiar with my work and the content of the course for each class.

phd supervisor burnout

Adding scientific signs to Indian Sign Language will create a more inclusive field for deaf students

By law, US universities are required to provide and pay for interpreters, so both my institutions, Georgetown University and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, provide interpreters at no cost to me.

I have to be conscious of how an interpreter might voice my research and scientific ideas to my colleagues, collaborators and prospective mentors. I’d be hesitant to pick an interpreter whom I didn’t know to speak on my behalf, especially for a formal presentation — partly because some scientific terms share the same sign. For example, the signs for the words ‘dye’ and ‘stain’ are the same in ASL — on both hands the index finger and thumb are touching, the other fingers are extended with the palms facing down, and the hands move up and down to represent dipping a material into a dye . Although it’s the same sign, the English words have completely different meanings in the scientific field. If I’m doing a presentation and the interpreter uses the wrong word, that can make me look like I’m not knowledgeable and that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Having an interpreter who’s motivated to learn these nuances is really important. For example, the interpreters here at the NIH watch the lab team do experiments and ask questions about our research, which is helpful. When I have to stop to explain things, I try not to think of it as wasting my time, when I could be doing my own work. Sometimes I have to take a few minutes to explain a process or concept while I do an experiment, but that can be beneficial in the long run.

Progress and burnout

I’ve focused on developing signs that work for me and my interpreters. But ASL has specific grammar rules for each sign, which a lot of the signs my interpreters and I have created probably don’t follow. That’s one of our many challenges: to develop signs for all Deaf scientists that follow the official ASL grammar rules.

Three other Deaf people work in my lab. One is a biologist who has worked here for more than 20 years. He’s developed a spreadsheet of scientific words and an explanation of how you sign each one. For example, the sign I use for metastasis starts with both hands facing each other with the fingers bent and moving in a zigzag motion, which indicates disorder, then both hands are extended forward simultaneously, moving apart to represent the cells spreading out.

phd supervisor burnout

What’s the sign for ‘centrifuge’? How we added scientific terms to Indian Sign Language

But this is not necessarily the best way to preserve a visual, signed language. Therefore, we are trying to develop a way to film the signs so that interpreters watching the videos can learn them. That would be a much better resource.

All of this has been a lot of work. I would love to have the chance to focus solely on my research, but I’ve been juggling my time between research, creating signs, working with my network of interpreters and everything else. The COVID-19 pandemic added to the problem. Before COVID-19, interpreters worked on site all the time. But now many of them prefer to work remotely. However, interpreting through a video call is not as useful as having an interpreter in the lab. We need them on site for spontaneous conversations when we’re troubleshooting protocols. This has made it even harder to find interpreters who can work at this level of science.

I am feeling burnt out from all this legwork. My energy should be invested in my research and my coursework, not making sure each interpreter understands what’s going on. It’s so much to manage, sometimes I feel like I have earned a PhD in linguistics, too. Continuing research after my PhD is still one of my options, but I’m also looking into project management or consultant jobs that use the knowledge and skills that I have developed.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00705-5

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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I grew up trying to win my parents' approval. I ended up getting a Ph.D., but it was solo travel that changed my life.

  • Angela, an American academic, started traveling solo in November.
  • Angela said she felt burned out after not taking any time off for many years.
  • She felt tied down by expectations to get married, but solo travel felt freeing.

Insider Today

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Angela, an academic and content creator in her early 40s who travels solo in Europe. Angela requested that her last name not be shared for privacy. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2020, I had a major setback. I was engaged and supposed to get married but realized that my fiancé wasn't the right person for me. I was living my life for other people's expectations and in fear of judgment. It was one of the most challenging years of my life.

I was born in Beijing and was raised by a traditional Chinese family that told me succeeding academically was the only way to find success in life. I spent most of my time studying and never got to travel or enjoy hobbies.

Related stories

In the early 2000s, I moved to the US on my own to pursue my education as an international student. I lived in Florida, Texas, and Southern California before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017. While I initially faced language and culture barriers, I adapted quickly to life in the US. I'm someone you call a "third culture individual" — I identify with both my American and Chinese cultures. I feel at home in the Bay Area, a place that celebrates diversity and inclusion.

Since moving to the US, I've earned a Ph.D. in information science and now work at a university as an academic. After living in the US for the past 20 years, I'm also a naturalized US citizen.

I traveled solo after breaking off my engagement

Apart from visiting family in China — my last trip to Beijing was in 2018 — I hadn't traveled solo until last year. I had always lived my life according to my parents' expectations. Like most Chinese parents, they expected me to succeed academically, get married, and have kids by a certain age. I never felt I was doing enough.

After breaking off the engagement, I worked on healing myself. Last year, I decided to try something I'd never done before, which was to travel solo internationally. For the first time, I felt like I was prioritizing myself and putting what I wanted to do first. I began documenting my solo travel on TikTok and Instagram .

I found it easy to connect with people abroad

I started my journey with a solo trip to Denmark and Sweden in November. A month later, I embarked on a monthlong solo trip traveling to eight cities in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Vatican City. And in February, I traveled to Iceland to celebrate my birthday on my own.

In addition to my regular time off, I have over 30 days of vacation a year I can accumulate. Because I work at a university, I also follow the academic calendar. For the monthlong trip to Europe, I took 3 weeks off and had a week of holiday leave for the Christmas break.

In total, I spent around $8,000 on that trip. All of my years of hard work have provided me with enough savings to fund my trips.

One of the things that I loved most about traveling solo was being able to meet and socialize with people from all walks of life. I'm an outgoing and social person, and it helped that I stayed in hostels so I could meet other travelers. But I realized that it was easy to meet people anywhere just by starting a conversation and saying hi.

In Rome, at the Colosseum , I met another solo traveler. After taking photos of each other, we ended up chatting and spending the rest of the day exploring the city and having dinner together. I met several different people in the same way.

Solo travel helped push me out of my comfort zone

Solo traveling is such an empowering experience. I have the complete freedom to decide what I want to do and where I want to go. I enjoy solitude when I want and socialize when I want.

It is the serendipity that makes solo traveling beautiful. I did a lot of self-discovery and self-growth. I learned that you don't have to live life a certain way. The world is big, there are many ways to live a fulfilling life. It's helped me gain clarity and put things into perspective.

Watch: Exclusive interview with Elon Musk on Twitter fame, loneliness, and the future of AI

phd supervisor burnout

  • Main content

IMAGES

  1. How To Overcome PhD Burnout?

    phd supervisor burnout

  2. How to Deal with Burnout as a PhD Student

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  3. PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

    phd supervisor burnout

  4. The secrets of dealing with burnout during your PhD

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  5. How to Prevent Burnout as a Healthcare Professional

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  6. Burnout & Chronic Stress

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  1. Important message to the PhD aspirants 🙏Plz subscribe to the channel

  2. How to find a PhD Supervisor|| Indian students who wish to study PhD abroad||PhD||Dr_kreative

  3. The silent danger of burnout: Why I quit my job and how it changed everything

  4. Find & Follow: Reduce Supervisor Burnout

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COMMENTS

  1. PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

    The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of: - Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; - Increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; - Reduced professional efficacy. Symptoms of burnout as classified by the WHO. Source.

  2. Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships

    Captivate and con. Occasionally, supervisor and student enter into a sexual relationship. This can be for a number of reasons, ranging from a desire to please to a need for power over youth. These ...

  3. PhD Burnout: Causes and Remedies

    As a dissertation coach, I regularly work with clients who are experiencing tremendous stress levels - for various reasons - including a lack of progress in the doctoral program, a lack of support and communications from their supervisor/chair/advisor, and/or time limit on their doctorate program is nearing an end (typical limit is 7 years).

  4. The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention

    At that time, 29% of 5,700 respondents listed their mental health as an area of concern — and just under half of those had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD study. Things ...

  5. (PDF) PhD supervisors and faculty members might help to avoid burnout

    PhD supervisors and faculty members might help to avoid burnout as well as enhance engagement and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) among PhD students December 2018 DOI: 10.20919/Psych ...

  6. PhD Burnout (and How to Avoid It)

    Hannah completed her PhD this year and is a Senior Content Writer here at FindAPhD. Her research focused on Early Modern English seafarers. Having finished a PhD, Hannah has a strong grasp on the student experiencve and the multiple academic and time pressures faced by PhD students. As a fourth year PhD student, I am well acquainted with burnout.

  7. A brief primer on the PhD supervision relationship

    While I myself have limited PhD supervision experience, I have reviewed the literature on PhD student-supervisor relationship and here present a brief primer. 1 INTRODUCTION Becoming a successful academic and securing a principal investigator (PI) position at a research-intensive university requires many distinct skills (e.g., Madan, 2021 ...

  8. Burnout and engagement among PhD students in medicine: the BEeP study

    The most important variables for burnout among PhD students in medicine were lack of sleep and frustration of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. ... Roberts M, Phua F. Determinants of PhD student satisfaction: the roles of supervisor, department, and peer qualities. Assess Eval High Educ. 2019; 44:1053-1068 ...

  9. Doctoral researchers' mental health and PhD training ...

    Means of the CBI subscales for personal burnout and work-related burnout were 49 and 47, the mean score in the CBI total scale was 48 (including only the personal and work-related burnout subscales).

  10. Frontiers

    Four well-being profiles were identified ().The first study well-being profile was high engagement-low burnout profile (see Table 3).It was the second most common profile among the participants with a 32.7 percent share (n=226).The PhD candidates in this profile reported rather high levels of study engagement meaning that they often felt enthusiastic and inspired by their doctoral work.

  11. [PDF] PhD supervisors and faculty members might help to avoid burnout

    Research points to PhD students as being particularly at risk, yet the factors that contribute to PhD students' compromised wellbeing are unclear. ... Our results point to the importance of support provided by both the supervisor and faculty members in helping to avoid burnout and enhance engagement among students. We also found that students ...

  12. Burnout and engagement among PhD students in medicine: the ...

    The most important variables for burnout among PhD students in medicine were lack of sleep and frustration of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. ... Thompson E, Roberts M, Phua F. Determinants of PhD student satisfaction: the roles of supervisor, department, and peer qualities. Assess Eval High Educ. 2019;44: ...

  13. 'You have to suffer for your PhD': poor mental health among doctoral

    More than 40% of PhD students met the criteria for moderate to severe depression or anxiety. In contrast, 32% of working professionals met these criteria for depression, and 26% for anxiety. The ...

  14. Burnout Culture. How the quest for a PhD led me to crash ...

    In January 2019, when I returned to my graduate research lab after Christmas break, I spent the first three weeks completely paralyzed. In theory, I knew I should be taking advantage of the little…

  15. Full article: Relationship between doctoral supervisors' competencies

    The prospective supervisor(s) reviews the research plan and the application prior to submission. The target time for undertaking a PhD is four years studying full-time, but the average time for degree completion is 5-6 years (Pyhältö et al., Citation 2022). There are no tuition fees, but funding is not automatically provided for doctoral ...

  16. Profiles of doctoral students' experience of ethics in supervision: an

    Supervision calls for pedagogical considerations of ethics as practiced in the student-supervisor relationship (Halse & Bansel, 2012).We have previously shown that Finnish PhD students' experiences of ethics in supervision predict research engagement, satisfaction with doctoral studies and supervision, burnout, and intentions to discontinue studies (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2020).

  17. PhD Student Burnout

    For PhD students, burnout may feel like high levels of chronic stress. PhD students often serve in a variety of roles as teachers, students, and researchers, and this unclear delineation of roles may in itself be a source of burnout stress. ... The best way around this is to check in with your supervisor and your peers who may have more ...

  18. Academic burnout among master and doctoral students during the ...

    This study analysed a number of factors thought to influence graduate students to develop academic burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burnout showed significantly lower among graduate students ...

  19. The Role of Supervision in Preventing Burnout among Professionals

    Burnout was analyzed both as a whole and per dimensions for a double purpose: on the one hand, to analyze whether the dimensions of burnout correlate negatively with the dimensions of supervision, which is explained in relation to the scale of supervision; and, on the other, to see if, in the case of clerics, a high level of emotional burnout ...

  20. PhD burnout

    Edit: Just wanted to also mention that a study conducted at Berkeley in 2015 found that 50% of all PhD students are clinically depressed and 10% suicidal. If you manage to get through this you'll come out stronger! 4 years into my Phd in epidemiology in London, finishing my last chapter, and holy shit am I burnt out.

  21. What Is Burnout? 16 Signs and Symptoms of Excessive Stress

    27 Feb 2021 by Alicia Nortje, Ph.D. Scientifically reviewed by Saima Latif, Ph.D. Feeling stressed, tired, or anxious about work is not unusual, but burnout can cause decreased physical and psychological health. Specifically, individuals who report experiencing burnout are: 63% more likely to take a ...

  22. Study Engagement and Burnout of the PhD Candidates in Medicine: A

    PhD Candidates' Well-Being. PhD candidates' study well-being is a multidimensional construct referring to a combination of positive mental states, such as satisfaction, self-efficacy or/and study engagement, and absence of extensive and severe negative ones such as burnout or strain related to doctoral studies, further contributing to a candidates ability to pursue their study goals ...

  23. Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout

    Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout Megan Majocha is gearing up to complete her PhD. But developing a sign-language lexicon to help her succeed took an immense toll ...

  24. PHD SURVIVAL GUIDE: tackling imposter syndrome, burnout ...

    Confessions of a 4th year PhD: imposter syndrome nearly crippled me at the start of grad school - I did not feel like I belonged. I didn't feel smart enough ...

  25. Solo Travel Allowed Me to Finally Put What I Wanted to Do First

    Since moving to the US, I've earned a Ph.D. in information science and now work at a university as an academic. After living in the US for the past 20 years, I'm also a naturalized US citizen.