Question about Supervision Styles

[annae]

I'm about to begin the field research part of my PhD. My supervisors are great, but I have been doing a lot of correspondence via email (I'm in another country now) and I'm having a hard time getting some questions answered. I was wondering if it is normal to expect a supervisor to review survey questions and other specific aspects of your methodological tools before actually collecting data? My approach has been approved generally via my proposal but no one has looked at the actual survey I'm conducting. I've been asking if I need to have these approved before departing and instead have been getting institutional forms to fill out. I know that these need to be done, but I am more worried about the specifics. Is this something a PhD student should have confidence in doing alone, provided the proposal was accepted? I do not want to sound needlessly insecure, but I do not want to make a mess out of my dissertation either.

[Sigaba]

5 hours ago, annae said:

I'm about to begin the field research part of my PhD. My supervisors are great, but I have been doing a lot of correspondence via email (I'm in another country now) and I'm having a hard time getting some questions answered. I was wondering if it is normal to expect a supervisor to review survey questions and other specific aspects of your methodological tools before actually collecting data? My approach has been approved generally via my proposal but no one has looked at the actual survey I'm conducting. I've been asking if I need to have these approved before departing and instead have been getting institutional forms to fill out. I know that these need to be done, but I am more worried about the specifics. Is this something a PhD student should have confidence in doing alone, provided the proposal was accepted? I do not want to sound needlessly insecure, but I do not want to make a mess out of my dissertation either.

Please keep in mind that being great at "A" is a different skill set than teaching someone else to be great at "A."

It's likely that the level of support you're getting from your supervisor is what it is. Do what you can to develop relationships in your department so you can get the support you need. Make sure that these efforts don't run afoul of your supervisor's prerogatives and preferences. For example, having a fellow graduate student review your survey questions may not be as preferable as having a professor do it, but the potential political blowback could be less.

[PokePsych]

Also depends on your survey. If you're using some standard questionnaire (common in psych) with standard questions, it's not necessarily needed. My uni also used standardized consent forms. I always ran instructions (if not from an existing questionnaire) and debrief by my advisor. I then had some fellow students check the flow of my survey and check for typos (and returned the favor of course). 

My advisor always wanted a copy of my survey in word form on which he made comments, but only on the non-standardized sections.