Postgraduate research supervision quality: Rethinking the value of doctoral supervision to design an integrative framework

Internationally, the Higher Education (HE) agenda is revealing a growing concern with the extension and impact of research at the postgraduate level, where doctoral studies are acquiring a greater significance and value, due to a set of professional, social, cultural and economic reasons. Thus, quality issues and discussions about doctoral supervision are extremely relevant to be considered and critically reviewed, because of their supra-national character and importance, although the discussion we will engage in is based on results gathered in a Portuguese context. The authors aim to contribute to the international context and broad reflection by presenting research that is being developed at a HE institution with the main objective of designing an integrative reference framework about the construct 'quality of doctoral supervision'. So the framework could be properly designed, we started by interviewing Portuguese experts on pedagogical and postgraduate research supervision, due to the epistemological links that can be established between those concepts. Therefore, with this paper we aim to (i) reflect on the international perspectives on this issue, and (ii) present the main results of the interviews, particularly by analysing their conceptions about the quality of doctoral supervision, so that a first draft of the framework can be designed.