The culture of research supervision in Ghanaian public universities: the potential influence of supervisor characteristics and institutional guidelines on completion time

Abstract

Worldwide, delays in the completion of student research work are a concern to many. Even though several researchers have critically come out with various influencing factors, the interest of this study was in how the characteristics of the supervisor and intuitional research guidelines influence the completion time of student research work. The population for the study was five public Ghanaian universities. The respondents were selected using stratified sampling techniques to answer the semi-structured electronic questionnaire. Some of the attention-grabbing findings of the study that could be argued are the complex interplay between lecturer characteristics (and not very much on institutional guidelines); and the time students use to complete their research work. This confirms the argument of the Expectancy-Value Theory for Help Sources (EVT-HS) model which links the availability of help to the use of it by students. The implications are that students should be allocated to supervisors based on the supervisors’ attitude towards student supervision as informed by their characteristics; since this potentially affects the help students get to complete their research projects in time. Hence, in practice, the importance of ensuring that supervisors help their students to complete their work on time cannot be over-emphasized.