Abstract
This paper explores doctoral students' experiences of their scholarly communities in terms of socio-psychological well-being. Further, the study examines how experiences were related to study engagement and to self-reported stress, exhaustion, and anxiety. Altogether 669 doctoral students from the University of Helsinki, Finland, responded a survey. The answers to an open-ended question were content analysed and then statistically compared to well-being and study engagement items. The results showed that there was variation in students' experiences of the scholarly community regarding socio-psychological well-being. More than half of the answers, where students had explicitly described their experience (n = 383), emphasised the scholarly community as source of burden (56%), but experiences of inspiration and empowerment were also frequently reported in the answers (44%). Feelings of empowerment were positively related to study engagement and negatively related to stress, exhaustion, and anxiety.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by University of Helsinki, Finland (2106008) and Academy of Finland (121207). We thank Hal White (MA) for helping us edit the manuscript.