The graduate research experience
Supervision and training
As a graduate student you will be assigned an academic supervisor, who is responsible for your academic well-being and progress. In addition to academic supervision, you will also have a college pastoral advisor.
You would expect to meet with your supervisor at least four times a term. In the early stages, your supervisor will assist you in settling into the pace of academic study, helping you identify your training needs in order to fulfil your research and will facilitate appropriate networking across the Collegiate University. As your research progresses, your supervisor will advise you on research design, comment on chapter drafts and provide guidance on any fieldwork.
In the final stages, your supervisor will comment on your final drafts as you progress to submission of your thesis and help you prepare for any viva examination. Your supervisor may also provide career guidance as you plan your future beyond your period of study.
Research methods training is a compulsory element of all of the taught graduate courses at the DPIR, and is also strongly encouraged for all DPhil candidates. The department promotes a plurality of methods in the work of its students, and as such offers a wide variety of methods courses to its students.
For all taught degrees there is a compulsory methods course taught in the first term, which is specific to your degree programme. This includes a number of different qualitative approaches to research, as well as basic statistical methods training.
In the second and third terms of your programme you have the opportunity to choose between many different methods courses. These are described in more detail on the pages for each course. These courses will help you to broaden your repertoire of research techniques and will support you as you begin to think about researching and writing your thesis. You are encouraged to continue to develop your research skills throughout your graduate career and beyond the formal requirements of your programme.
How does supervision work at Oxford?
Fieldwork
As a graduate student you may undertake a period of overseas fieldwork for your MPhil or DPhil research.
Fieldwork may involve:
- Elite interviews with policy-makers and political elites or interviews in the field
- Desk research using archival or library resources
- Surveys to produce larger data sets for quantitative analysis
- Ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of time by living in a community/country or working in an institution
In the last few years students from the Department have spent time undertaking research in Angola, Argentina, Belarus, Burundi, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Russia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Thailand, Tanzania, Uganda, Europe and North America.
Some funding for fieldwork is available through a number of Departmental and College schemes to which students can apply. Your supervisor will help you plan your fieldwork and training is provided through research design workshops and sessions on specific techniques such as elite interviewing and panel data.