ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1600872
This article is part of the Research TopicWell-being and Cognitive Science in Higher Education: Measures and InterventionView all 6 articles
How Doctoral Students' Role Perceptions Influence Advisor-Advisee Relationships and Academic Progress: A Case Study
Provisionally accepted- Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea
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This qualitative research investigated how doctoral (Ph.D.) students' role perceptions influenced their expectations and behaviors, thereby influenced advisor-advisee relationships and academic progress. Doctoral advising is essential for doctoral students' academic progress. One of the factors to influence doctoral students' academic progress is the advisor-advisee relationships. Under the guidance of Biddle's Role Theory, the researchers aimed to find out how doctoral students' perceptions of the advisors' roles and their own roles influenced their advisor-advisee relationships. Doctoral advisor-advisee relationship can influence doctoral students' academic progress. By interviewing three Chinese Ph.D. students who studied in Korea, interview videos, emails, and messages between the participants and their advisors were collected as data. Data from the interviews were the main data resource.Other resources were used to support the data from interviews. These data were analyzed using qualitative methods, including transcription, coding, and member checking. The coding process was based on the transcription, and the member checking process ensured the validity the study. The findings indicated that variations in participants' role perceptions can significantly influence the advisor-advisee relationships, which in turn influenced academic progress. Suggestions for advising Ph.D. students and limitations of this study were provided at the end of this study.
Keywords: role perceptions, expectation, Behavior, Advsior-advisee relationship, Academic progress
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wu and Kim. 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) or licensor 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:
Hechun Wu, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea
Jungyin Kim, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea
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