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Medical education and training
Research
Supervisors' perspective on medical thesis projects and dropout rates: survey among thesis supervisors at a large German university hospital
  1. Elif Can1,
  2. Felicitas Richter2,
  3. Ralitsa Valchanova2,
  4. Marc Dewey1,2
  1. 1Charité Graduate Programme, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
  2. 2Department of Radiology, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
  1. Correspondence to Professor Marc Dewey; dewey{at}charite.de

Abstract

Objectives To identify underlying causes for failure of medical thesis projects and the constantly high drop-out rate in Germany from the supervisors' perspective and to compare the results with the students' perspective.

Setting Cross-sectional survey. Online questionnaire for survey of medical thesis supervisors among the staff of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. Published, earlier longitudinal survey among students for comparison.

Participants 1069 thesis supervisors participated.

Data extraction and synthesis Data are presented using descriptive statistics, and the χ2 test served to compare the results among supervisors with the earlier data from the longitudinal survey of doctoral students.

Primary and secondary outcomes Not applicable. This survey is an observational study.

Results Of 3653 potential participants, 1069 (29.3%) supervising 3744 doctoral candidates participated in the study. Supervisors considered themselves to be highly motivated and to offer adequate supervision. On the other hand, 87% stated that they did not feel well prepared for thesis supervision. Supervisors gave lack of timeliness of doctoral students and personal differences (p=0.024 and p=0.001) as the main reasons for terminating thesis projects. Doctoral students predominantly mentioned methodological problems and difficult subjects as critical issues (p=0.001 and p<0.001). Specifically, students felt ill prepared for the statistical part of their research—49.5% stated that they never received statistical assistance, whereas 97% of supervisors claimed to help their students with statistical analysis.

Conclusions The authors found that both thesis supervisors and medical students feel ill prepared for their roles in the process of a medical dissertation. Contradictory reasons for terminating medical thesis projects based on supervisors' and students' self-assessment suggest a lack of communication and true scientific collaboration between supervisors and doctoral students as the major underlying issue that requires resolution.

  • scientific work
  • medical dissertation
  • medical research

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012726

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors MD, EC and FR conceived and designed the study. MD, EC, FR and RV were responsible for analysis and interpretation of data. EC drafted and MD critically revised the article for important intellectual content; all authors approved the final manuscript. MD is the guarantor. The article was initiated by the authors, who had full control of the data analysis and interpretation, and there was no industry sponsorship.

    • Funding This study was financially supported by Stiftung Charité (http://www.stiftung-charite.de/de/stiftung-charite.html) and the Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The funding sources had no say in the design of this study or in its execution or analysis, interpretation of the data, or decision to submit results.

    • Competing interests MD has received grant support from the Heisenberg Programme of the DFG for a professorship (DE 1361/14-1), the FP7 Programme of the European Commission for coordinating the DISCHARGE project (603266-2, HEALTH-2012.2.4.-2), the European Regional Development Fund (20072013 2/05, 20072013 2/48). MD is an associate editor of Radiology and European Radiology. EC is a physician and her salary was supported by the above grant to MD from Stiftung Charité; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. FR is a statistician and her salary was supported by a grant from DFG; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. RV is a PhD in Biology working as a tutor in the Charité graduate programme and her salary was supported by the Dean's Office; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

    • Ethics approval The data protection office at Charité approved the anonymised online survey.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Requests for participant level data will be considered by the Charité graduate programme and computational survey details can be provided. We can also provide the entire questionnaire which includes additional statements of supervisors, information about time expenditure, gender and position. At the moment the data is available in German on our department's server, but can be translated if required.