Agentic scientists or exhausted workers? Supervision, identity, and epistemic agency of medical doctoral students in Hong Kong
Sichen Lai, Yun DaiPurpose
As academic environments become increasingly competitive and complex, cultivating doctoral students’ scholarly independence and autonomy is essential. Though previous studies emphasize supervision, identity, and epistemic agency as critical for doctoral training, the interplay among these factors remains under-examined. This study investigates how supervisory styles influence doctoral students’ academic and professional identities and epistemic agency within medical education in Hong Kong, and how their identity and agency interact.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative, multiple-case study was conducted, using individual students as the units of analysis. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 14 final-year or recently graduated doctoral students. Thematic analysis was employed to identify key patterns related to the interplay among the supervisory style, student identity, and epistemic agency.
Findings
Three themes emerged: (1) high-support, high-structure supervision encourages dual identities and promotes epistemic agency, (2) low-support, high-structure supervision limits academic identity and epistemic agency and (3) strong academic identity is closely associated with high-level epistemic agency.
Originality/value
This study advances understandings of how supervisory practices shape doctoral students’ identities and epistemic agency. It offers practical insights for supervisors and institutions to support the development of agentic researchers in applied fields.