Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2011 - Higher ...

PRES 2011 Results – September 2011
Figure 3.8: What type of career do you have in mind for when you complete your research degree? Q20
This item also allows respondents to enter a free-text comment. Frequent response types included: a
combination of all the factors (with the combination of interest and career being common); a long-held
ambition; a desire to help people; to exercise the brain and expand knowledge; and the lack of other
options 24 .
3.2.1.1 Discipline
Research on the National Student Survey has found that, for that survey, subject of study has a large
effect on overall experience 25 . Similar effects are suggested by analyses performed on data from the
Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire in Australia, upon which PRES is based 26 . These findings
from other surveys provide a rationale for splitting PRES data into separate discipline clusters.
There are indeed some interesting differences when responses to Q19 (motivations for undertaking
postgraduate research) are broken down by discipline area (see Figure 3.9). A larger proportion of Arts &
Humanities students were motivated by an interest in the subject (43.5% of Arts & Humanities
respondents chose this option, as opposed to 36.4% STEM, 34.8% Social Sciences and 28.2% Health). The
largest proportion of students motivated by improving academic career prospects was in Health
disciplines (37.4%) closely followed by Social Sciences (35.7%), with Arts & Humanitie s (30.2%) and STEM
(27.7%) much lower.
24 Analysis has not at this time been performed on the fr ee-text data; this is an initial assessment of responses only.
It is hoped that participating institutions will obtain valuable information at local level from the free-text data.
25 See Surridge (2009).
26 See Marsh et al. (2002).
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