Retention and Completion of a Doctoral Nursing Programme: Sense Making Through Collective Reflection

This discussion paper explores the group experience of a cohort of eight nurses completing our university's first professional nursing doctorate programme.

This paper aims to make sense of our shared experience and to contribute to what is known about doctoral study by sharing our insights.

Discursive paper.

Through individual and group reflections on our experience, we address the questions 'why did we stay'? and 'how do we make sense of the fact that we all, as a group, successfully completed the programme'? We drew on principles of collaborative and collective auto-ethnography to guide our group reflexivity in response to these questions.

The main reasons we gave for staying were: (i) commitment, which had three strands - 'proving', 'obligation' and 'self-determination' - and (ii) shared-identity and common humanity. The two further elements that helped us make sense of our cohort's completion were (i) the joy of learning together and (ii) professional friendship and Socratic inquiry.

As the first programme cohort for the nursing doctorate in our area, we became a close and supportive group, which we argue contributed to our success. We ascribed this to our characteristics as doctoral students and the creation of a sisterhood reminiscent of a community of practice. We also acknowledged the importance of the WhatsApp platform in facilitating group cohesion, and the sense of reflexive closure brought by the process of reflection at the end of our programme.

We recommend that doctoral cohorts, supervisors, and teaching teams systematically plan opportunities into programmes for organic relationship development and consider how the literature on communities of practice and academic persistence might support academic development. Academic staff could also encourage students to set up an online communication channel such as WhatsApp or similar at an early stage in their programmes and give particular consideration to closure and transition to post-doctoral practice on completion of professional doctorates.