Getting together to overcome research loneliness in two Argentinian virtual writing groups.

ESPECHE, MARIA PAULA; COLOMBO, LAURA

West Yorkshire

Conferencia; The 8th Annual Researcher Education and Development Scholarship International Conference; 2022

University of Leeds

Feelings of loneliness are unfortunately common in doctoral studies and they can be one of the reasons for students dropping out their programs. Among the different initiatives that look to improve research trajectories and widen participation in research, virtual writing groups (VWGs) have been found to offer social support to researchers.These groups can be characterized according to the activities carried out during the meetings as concurrent or response VWGs. In the former participants gather to review each other's drafts and in the latter members meet and write together, not necessarily sharing their texts. Nevertheless, these groups are incipient in Latin American universities. Our study reports on participants´ perspectives on the role that VWGs can play to cope with feelings of loneliness after conducting thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with graduate students from different Latin American countries. Results show that both concurrent and response VWGs provide access to support networks that lessen the impact of loneliness on research careers. Despite the limited scope of our study, we hope our findings can inform future implementations as well as contribute to our knowledge on writing-based initiatives to help support doctoral education.