Last week we successfully completed our first focus group for our project looking at how Library and Learning Services communicates with PhD researchers.
We have some great data to look at, including the pictured PhD timeline, which was jointly created by the participants in the group.
Although it was clear from the feedback from a single group that the PhD experience diverged quite significantly according to factors such as discipline and supervisor, we’re keen to run a second group. This would allow us to establish to what extent our local processes give students a particular character of experience, and hopefully extend our participant pool to all four of the facilities.
We’re also planning to include those who were unable to make face to face groups (including distance and international students) with a questionnaire based on the outcomes from the groups.
The approaching Easter holidays mark a good point to start analysis and plan next stages, so I’ll report further then.