Facing the dropout crisis among PhD candidates: the role of supervisor support in emotional well-being and intended doctoral persistence among men and women

“According to Deci and Ryan (2000, 2002), feeling of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, are essential for ongoing psychological growth and integrity, as well as for constructive social development and personal wellbeing.”

“Considering that emotion regulation is an essential feature of mental health (Gross and John 2003), dysregulated emotions are often used as indicators of low psychological well-being (Houben, Van Den Noortgate, and Kuppens 2015).”

“Additionally, these interventions could include self-compassion components (Neff 2003) which have been found to be associated with less negative emotions (Wollast et al. 2020a; Wollast et al. 2020b; Wollast et al. 2023) and more positive emotions (Wollast et al. 2019).”

“Finally, a strict invariance model is tested in which factor loadings, intercepts and residuals are constrained to be equal across groups (Putnick and Bornstein 2016).”

“…are attentive to maintaining candidates’ motivation and effort by providing both leadership (in terms of communicating clear directions) and support (e.g. constructive feedback), which will help candidates improve their skills and achieve a sense of competence (Jang, Reeve, and Deci 2010).”

“Doctoral attrition is often associated with the higher prevalence of psychological distress among doctoral candidates (Levecque et al. 2017).”