Separated at Birth? Finding Methodological Siblings for Supervisory Teams

The project was developed to increase understanding of the skills and knowledge that students are required to develop over the course of doctoral research. This includes the knowledge and skills required to complete their research, as well as those required to become employable and/or established within their discipline. Through collating the perspectives of a sample of academics responsible for doctoral supervision across the discipline areas at the University of Hertfordshire the research sought an understanding of where these skills and knowledge sets converged across disciplines. This was to enable conclusions to be drawn concerning opportunities for interdisciplinary research training and supervision, which would be of broad use to both the university and wider sector in strategically addressing skill gaps and promoting interdisciplinary engagement.

Significant progress was made in mapping doctoral supervision and training activities across schools. This highlighted variations and discrepancies, even amongst disciplines sharing common methodological roots. It also highlighted commonalities in the practices, approaches and priorities of disciplines that, prima facie, would not have shared so much in common. The project was not able to advance to primary data collection, although the progress made was of value to critically re-evaluating what was, at the time, the GTR (researcher training) programme.