Summary: Oscillating Role Identities

Oscillating Role Identities There is little information on the relationship between doctoral students’ experiences and emerging identities. As well as everyday events and experiences of students. Jazvac-Martek (2009) hopes the framework and identity of doctoral students can potentially reveal unknown doctoral education issues. Also, by showing internal and external influences on the pupils, their involvement and contributions to academia can be determined (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. 253). This article uses the work of social psychology’s Role Identity Theory, a theory that believes students have multiple identities and roles. It acts to appraise thoughts and actions, plans for activities, and how individuals interpret and respond to their …show more content…
It is a Canadian Research 1 institution, which is a Carnegie classification. It analyzes a four-year doctorate with course work, exams, and a formal dissertation that includes, research proposal, data collection, analysis, writing and oral defense. The participants are nine full-time students, one male, eight female, and all Caucasian. The students were studied for two years during the final stages of their studies. There were three types of qualitative data, logs of experiences about feeling like an academic, pre-interview questions about career and educational goals, and two lengthy interviews exploring the later two in-depth. Qualitative software called MAxQDA analyzed the data. This combined with thematic analysis, which is used to find patterns within data, themes were discovered (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. …show more content…
The students were also aware of when and how they took on academic positions and felt like they belonged to that community. The data found that to feel like an academic, students needed to take on the role of an academic, have it verified and supported by others involved (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. 258). Because the students don't entirely abandon the student role for the academic one, there are notion oscillating role identities. Students are fluidly moving back and forth between a student and an academic (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. 259). The students displayed a movement in which they identify as “becoming” an academic, rather than “being” a student (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. 260). In the closing discussion it is stated that to claim a role identity, the actions of others must be consistent with that role and accepted (Jazvac-Martek, 2009, pg. 261). I fear that my weakness, a lack of experience with the academic role, will deter my move back and forth between student and academic. I also worry that self-isolation will occur if I struggle to engage and fulfill the educational role because this is an online education. I hope that conversations, interactions, and exchanges in our online discussions will help me (Richardson,

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