Difficulties while Conducting Research in Academia: Taking M.Phil Students’ Perspectives in Public and Private Universities

Abstract

The thesis work has been the integral part of the MPhil in Education program. However, it has been observed that students are in a great fix regarding the completion of their thesis work. So, the purpose was to investigate the difficulties encountered by the students during research at MPhil level. Their experiences were further examined on the basis of their gender and university type. The data was collected by the survey. The conveniently selected sample consisted of 300 MPhil students including male and female, studying in public as well as in private universities. The data was collected through a questionnaire which was a 4-point Rating Scale comprising 25 items. It has 3 factors: i) supervisor’ selection, ii) supervisors’ support, iii) institutional support. The descriptive statistics for calculating the percentage of students’ perspectives as well as Inferential Statistics (Mann-Whitney U tests) was used to find out the difference on the basis of students’ gender and university type. The results revealed that majority of students selected their supervisors themselves willingly, but few of them forced to select their supervisor on their teachers’ referrals, research topics were allotted to students by supervisors themselves. Their supervisors were not easily approachable as they were unable to give students the due time because of their academic and administrative burdensome responsibilities, even neither the concerned HOD/ director is available at ease for students nor they are provided the access to paid e-libraries. By keeping in mind, the importance of thesis in accomplishment of degrees of MPhil students, there is need to conduct further studies to explore supervisors’ point of view as some of the problems are concerned with the supervisors’ support too, that will help to minimize the students’ problems.