Mentoring Relationships: Shedding Light on PhD Student Perspective - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 223

Othe r Engine ering
Scie nces and Te chnologies
12%

Nanotechnology
1%

Civil Engineering
13% Indus trial B iote chnology

0%

Environme ntal
B iote chnology
1%

Environme ntal
Engine e ring
10%

Ele ctrical Engineering,
Ele ctronics and
Compute rs
28%

M e dical Engineering
3%

Material Engineering
12%

Chemical Engineering
11%

Me chanical Engineering
9%

Fig. 4. Distribution of total doctorates concluded in Portugal by scientific expertise domain in
Engineering Science and Technology field. Adapted from [8].

3 Methodology

In Research field there are different sorts of questions that need to be answered, some
requiring quantitative methods, and some requiring qualitative methods. In
approaches where the question is a qualitative, then the most appropriate and rigorous
way to construe it is to use qualitative methods. Qualitative research is characterised
by its aims, which requires the understanding of some aspect of social issues, and its
methods generate words, rather than numbers, as data for analysis. Qualitative
methods such as interviews or focus groups can give some answers that the
quantitative responses cannot! Whereas the quantitative methods identify the extent of
the problem, qualitative methods can be used to give some of the detail, and the
perception of how individuals see the questions: the 'how' and 'why' [9].
In this section, the research methodology (its nature, description and design) and
the characterization of the study participants are described. In this study, and to
answer to the research questions, semi-structured interview was chosen to collect
data. This approach was considered due to the heterogeneity of the group, offering
sufficient flexibility to covering the same areas of data collection. A descriptive
qualitative methodology was used with the objective to define the characteristics of
the target population (doctoral students), identifying possible relationships between
the defined variables.
Interviews are conduced accordingly to the researcher's needs for data. Also, they
are conduct in the most rigorous way in order to ensure their reliability and validity.
This means that both the researchers and the interviewed people can be as confident
as possible that the findings reflect what the research set out to answer, mitigating the