Doctoral program management bodies: a study based on regulatory documents from eleven countries

Abstract

Improving doctoral training requires optimizing the management of its programs, which justifies the creation of collegiate bodies to facilitate this process. The study aimed to identify trends associated with the missions, structuring, and functional content of doctoral program management bodies by examining regulatory documents from eleven Latin American and European countries. Twenty national, institutional, and doctoral program regulations were reviewed using qualitative content analysis. In addition to descriptive statistical techniques, theoretical analysis-synthesis, induction-deduction, and the comparative method were used. Missions that regularly justify the creation of the management bodies under study were identified, as well as trends related to their names, composition, and access methods. The behavior of their functional content was characterized by considering twelve processes characteristic of doctoral training. The conclusions were: there is a general consensus and the creation of specific collegiate bodies to manage doctoral programs is an established practice; The way in which these bodies are established and structured, as well as their names, vary widely; the functional content of these bodies varies in terms of the number of established functions and the number of doctoral training processes to which they contribute; and there is an imbalance in the priority given, based on their functional content, to key and strategic processes associated with training.