Kay Devine

Doctoral Students' Emotional Exhaustion and Intentions to Leave Academia

Introduction The decision to pursue a doctoral degree is considerable, given the time, resources, and commitment required. After admission, significant life changes often follow for students and their families. Furthermore, a typical doctoral program in North America takes five to seven years to complete, usually followed by two to four years of postdoctoral training in many of the sciences (Golde, 2001; Onwuegbuzie & Wao, 2011). In Europe and Australia, the time to degree varies, with humanities doctorates taking the longest (Kehm, 2006) and average completion time of about seven years in England (Jump, 2013), and four years in Australia (Jiranek, 2010). Literature Review Despite the gravity of such a decision, research reveals that many students do not understand what doctoral training involves (Golde & Dore, 2001), and consequently, students may be unprepared or poorly equipped to cope with the various challenges of their programs. Doctoral students have previously experienced high academic achievement (Ali & Kohun, 2006; Lovitts, 2001), but many experience depression during their program due to financial stress, debt, isolation, thesis difficulties, and problems with their advisor (Ali & Kohun, 2007; Delamont, Atkinson, & Parry, 2004). Many doctoral students decide to abandon their studies: average rates of attrition in North American and Australian doctoral education have been reported to be as high as 50% for the past 50 years (Gardner & Gopaul, 2012; Jiranek, 2010; Kerlin, 1995; Lovitts, 2001; Spaulding & Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2012; Stallone, 2004), with a rate of 57% in North America reported by the Council of Graduate Schools in 2008 (Gardner, 2009). Even where completion rates are higher, such as New Zealand (61%) and the United Kingdom (72%), there are still many who do not graduate (Jump, 2013). Overall, it seems there is a dichotomy in doctoral student experiences: doctoral work can be a positive experience with intellectual and personal growth (Golde, 2001), thus contributing to student well-being, or it can be a negative experience, resulting in anxiety and emotional exhaustion (Pyhalto, Toom, Stubb, & Lonka, 2012; Stubb, Pyhalto, & Lonka, 2011). The intent of this research is to gain a better understanding of the negative factors that contribute to poor outcomes in doctoral education. We focus, in particular, on emotional exhaustion, a component of burnout that occurs when individuals experience a depletion of emotional energy and resources as a result of coping with high demands (Maslach & Jackson, 1981). In the present study, a mixed methods research design is used to examine antecedents of doctoral student emotional exhaustion and plans to leave academia to better understand doctoral student attrition. Doctoral Student Persistence Early research on attrition determinants focused on student characteristics and found no meaningful differences between persistors and nonpersistors (Clewell, 1987). More recently, however, both individual and institutional factors have been examined (de Valero, 2001). For example, individual characteristics such as intellectual and psychological preparation (Hawley, 2003), demographic characteristics, financial means (Abedi & Benkin, 1987), deficiencies (Green, 1997), stress (Jairam & Kahl, 2012), social isolation (Gardner, 2007; Jairam & Kahl, 2012) and the burden of the scholarly community (Stubb et al., 2011) have been found to contribute to attrition. Institutional characteristics also contribute to withdrawals, including the social structure and culture of graduate education (Lovitts, 2001), the socialization process (Gardner, 2008), program quality (Picciano, Rudd, Morrison, & Nerad, 2008), and lack of support services (West, Gokalp, Vallejo, Fischer & Gupton, 2011). In addition, the academic discipline or field of study also predicts attrition (Bair & Haworth, 2005; Golde, 2005), with higher levels of attrition occurring in the social sciences and humanities, and lower levels in the sciences (e. …

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