The Development and Psychometric Properties of a Doctoral Student Agency Scale

Doctoral student agency is increasingly regarded as a key construct in doctoral education. Yet, existing research on this topic focuses on qualitative approaches, and there remains a lack of psychometrically validated instruments, particularly in the Chinese context, where supervisory authority and institutional structures strongly shape student experiences. This study aimed to develop and validate the Doctoral Student Agency Scale (DSAS) to provide a comprehensive measure of doctoral students' agency during the process of professional socialization. A sequential mixed-methods design was adopted. First, a conceptual model was inductively constructed from semi-structured interviews with 27 doctoral students, followed by three-level qualitative coding to generate an initial pool of items. These were refined through expert review, and 436 valid responses were subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The final DSAS consists of 27 items organized into 7 first-order factors, which load onto 3 second-order dimensions: self-agency, academic agency, and resource agency. Moreover, DSAS scores significantly correlated with academic ability and research role identity, two critical outcomes of doctoral student professional socialization, thus confirming the criterion validity. These findings indicate that the DSAS is a valid and reliable instrument. Theoretically, it contributes to refining the multidimensional conceptualization of doctoral agency, while practically, it provides supervisors and institutions with a diagnostic tool to design targeted interventions and foster doctoral development in context-sensitive ways.