Quality in postgraduate research
The influence of interconnected elements
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20853/40-5-8532Keywords:
interconnected elements, student, topic, supervision, institution, communityAbstract
Quality in postgraduate research is a socially constructed concept that undergoes regular reinterpretation and adaptation. Debates raise questions concerning the factors that influence the student’s achievement of all the attributes associated with the concepts of mastery and doctorateness. Based on illustration from global literature on the topic of postgraduate research, this article argues for an integrated connectedness between a number of elements that, when limited or lacking, can compromise the quality of the research. The elements discussed are: the student, the topic, the supervisor, the institution and, with an increasing emphasis on the transferability of knowledge outputs to interested parties beyond the academy, the community or communities that may reap benefit from the research and who are often the source of basic data on which the research has depended. It proposes that integration of these elements is fundamental to the demonstration of all the expected graduate attributes, including the dissemination of findings beyond the academy in ways appropriate to the intellectual, personal and public domains of the research output.
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