Doctoral wellbeing is one of the most requested thesis topics in education, psychology and higher education studies, and one of the easiest to cite badly. A single frightening percentage travels from paper to paper, stripped of its sample, its instrument and its year, until nobody can say what it measured. A supervisor who is asked to approve a thesis on postgraduate mental health needs three things: a short list of survey sources that can be cited with confidence, a clear view of what each one does and does not show, and a faculty standard for the ethics of asking vulnerable respondents about distress. This guide sets out all three, using only sources that a student can open and check.
Wellbeing, mental health and satisfaction are different constructs
Three ideas are routinely collapsed. Satisfaction asks how a researcher rates their experience of supervision, resources or community. Wellbeing is a broader concept covering how a person is doing. Mental health symptoms are measured with screening questionnaires that estimate risk, not diagnoses. A thesis that says it “measures wellbeing” but reports a satisfaction item, or one that says it “measures depression” but administers a general screening tool, has a construct problem before it has a data problem.
Ask every student to answer one question in the proposal: which of these three constructs does the research question concern, and which instrument operationalises it? The rest of this guide helps a supervisor judge the answer.
Three sources a supervisor can check line by line
The following table compares the sources discussed below. Every figure in it comes from the publisher’s or an indexing service’s record of the source.
| Source | Population and size | What it measures | Best use in a thesis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Levecque, Anseel, De Beuckelaer, Van der Heyden and Gisle, Research Policy 46(4), 868–879 (2017) | PhD students in Flanders, Belgium; N = 3,659; compared with three other groups | 12 mental health symptoms (GHQ-12), plus organisational factors | Risk screening and the link to work organisation and supervision |
| Advance HE, Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2025 sector report | 35,475 responses from 93 institutions, including four in Australia | Satisfaction and experience items, including support for health and wellbeing, and reasons for considering leaving | Sector-level context and trends in the research degree experience |
| Evans, Bira, Gastelum, Weiss and Vanderford, “Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education”, Nature Biotechnology 36(3), 282–284 (2018) | Graduate students | Not summarised here | A student should open and cite the original, not a secondary summary |
Levecque et al. (2017): what a screening result means
The Flemish study assessed the prevalence of mental health problems in a representative sample of PhD students (N = 3,659) and compared them with three groups: highly educated members of the general population, highly educated employees, and higher education students. On the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, 32% of PhD students were at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression, a figure the authors report as significantly higher than in the comparison groups. The abstract also links the prevalence to organisational factors: the work-family interface, job demands and job control, the supervisor’s leadership style, team decision-making culture, and the perception of a career outside academia.
Three cautions follow for supervision. First, “at risk” is a screening threshold, not a diagnosis, and a thesis should never rewrite it as “32% of doctoral students are depressed”. Second, the sample is Flemish, so a thesis in another country must say so rather than generalise. Third, the paper’s own emphasis on supervisor leadership and decision-making culture makes it a relevant source for an institution thinking about supervision quality, not only about counselling.
PRES 2025: a sector satisfaction survey with a wellbeing item
The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey is run by Advance HE in the United Kingdom. Its 2025 sector report records 35,475 responses from 93 institutions, four of them in Australia. Participation follows a pattern: the report’s history table shows 117 institutions and 57,689 responses in 2017, 107 and 50,600 in 2019, 94 and 39,855 in 2021, 105 and 37,661 in 2023, with smaller counts in the intervening years. A supervisor should therefore tell students to compare like with like, because biennial high-participation years differ in size from the years between.
For a wellbeing thesis, three parts of the report matter. The survey includes an item, “The support for health and wellbeing meets my needs”, which the report breaks down by whether a respondent reports a disability. It also tracks the share of researchers who considered leaving their course: 25% in 2025, which the report describes as the lowest in recent years, against between 26% and 28% in each of the six years charted before it. And among those who considered leaving, it reports the share citing mental or emotional health:
| Reason for considering leaving | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mental/emotional health | 23% | 24% | 19% | 20% |
| Financial difficulties | 12% | 17% | 16% | 14% |
| Difficulties balancing research and other commitments | 15% | 11% | 15% | 13% |
| Not enough support for research | 8% | 8% | 8% | 8% |
| Family or personal problems | 5% | 5% | 5% | 6% |
The report states that these are shown as a proportion of those who considered leaving, and it comments that mental and emotional reasons had been the main driver in recent years, with financial reasons rising and then settling. The denominator matters. A thesis that writes “20% of researchers cite mental health as a reason to leave” is misreading a share of the 25% who considered leaving.
Evans et al. (2018): cite the original
The 2018 Nature Biotechnology article by Evans and colleagues is the kind of paper students often meet first through summaries. A supervisor should require the student to open the original, record the sample and the instruments it used, and report them directly. This guide deliberately gives no headline figure for it, because the value of a citation check is that the student reads the paper.
What none of these sources can tell a thesis
- Causes. Cross-sectional surveys show association. The Flemish paper identifies factors linked with risk; it does not show that changing supervision would change outcomes.
- A single department. A sector figure says little about one department. A thesis about a single institution needs its own data, collected with consent.
- Trends across countries. The two quantitative sources use different instruments, populations and years, so their numbers cannot be placed on one axis.
- Those who left. PRES respondents are researchers still studying or who had just finished, as the report itself notes, so people who withdrew are absent.
A faculty standard for wellbeing and mental health theses
Research on distress needs more governance than most topics. A workable standard covers six points.
- Construct and instrument. Name the construct, the instrument, its version and the permission to use it. Do not accept “a validated wellbeing scale” without a citation.
- Screening is not diagnosis. Require wording that describes scores as risk indicators or symptom levels, never as diagnoses.
- A distress protocol. Say in the consent form and ethics application what happens if a respondent reports severe distress, and where the respondent is signposted. Supervisors should confirm the signposting details are current before data collection begins.
- Anonymity and small cells. Set a minimum cell size for reporting by department, gender or disability so that individuals cannot be identified in tables or appendices.
- Researcher wellbeing. Students who read open-text accounts of distress are exposed too. The standard should name a debriefing contact for them.
- Route through ethics. Treat wellbeing studies as at least departmental-level review. The guide to a risk-tiered ethics and access pathway for thesis research shows how a tiered route can be set up.
The standard can be one page, attached to the proposal template. Its purpose is to make the supervisor’s conversation with the student predictable, and to prevent a wellbeing project from reaching data collection without a protocol.
How a supervisor can use the sources in the early chapters
Used well, the three sources make a defensible background section. The student states the construct, cites the Flemish study for the link between work organisation and risk, cites PRES for sector context and the specific item and reasons table that matter to the question, and then states what the thesis will add. If the thesis is a local study, the PRES figures become a benchmark and the local data a comparison, with the differences in population explained. For engagement-style constructs the same discipline applies, as set out in the companion guide to student engagement survey data for thesis supervisors.
Supervisors can also help students avoid a common numerical error. If a thesis compares its own percentage with a published one, the denominators and the response options must match. A five-point agreement item reported as “agree or strongly agree” is not the same as a binary yes or no. The same warning appears in the discussion of denominators in the piece on writing centre utilisation data.
Ten researchable questions for a wellbeing cohort list
- How do supervision-meeting frequency and reported support for wellbeing relate in one faculty?
- Do part-time doctoral candidates and full-time candidates report different experiences of belonging?
- How do international researchers describe the role of financial pressure in their wellbeing?
- What do students who considered leaving say would have changed their decision?
- How do reported experiences differ between researchers with and without a disability in a single institution?
- How do supervisor leadership styles relate to candidate stress in one discipline?
- How do first-year researchers and final-year researchers differ in reported community?
- What is the internal consistency of a short wellbeing scale in a doctoral sample?
- How do mixed-method accounts of the write-up phase compare with survey answers?
- How do institutional support services get used, and by whom, according to administrative records and a candidate survey?
Each question needs the construct check, the instrument permission and the ethics standard before approval. Topics that depend on candidates’ records, such as the final question, also raise the data-access questions discussed in the guide to giving thesis students national data, where access tiers decide whether a proposal is feasible.
Where Tesify fits
Supervisors and graduate schools decide which wellbeing sources and ethics standards a cohort works to. Once a candidate has an approved design and is writing, Tesify helps students structure and organise their thesis while they write 100% of the work themselves: more than 9,000 students have written over 15,000 chapters with Tesify. See how Tesify supports a thesis cohort.
Frequently asked questions
What did Levecque and colleagues find about PhD students?
In a representative sample of 3,659 PhD students in Flanders, 32% were at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression, on the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. The authors report this as higher than in three comparison groups.
Does the 32% figure mean one in three doctoral students is depressed?
No. It reports risk on a screening questionnaire in one Flemish sample. A thesis should describe it as risk of a common psychiatric disorder, not as a diagnosis, and should not apply it to other countries without saying so.
How large was PRES 2025?
The sector report records 35,475 responses from 93 institutions, including four from Australia.
What share of PRES respondents considered leaving?
The 2025 report puts it at 25%, which it describes as the lowest in recent years. Among those who considered leaving, 20% cited mental or emotional health, 14% financial difficulties and 13% difficulties balancing research and other commitments.
Can a thesis compare its own survey with PRES?
Only if the items, response options, population and denominators match. Otherwise the thesis should present PRES as context and explain why a direct comparison is not valid.
Should a wellbeing thesis go through full ethics committee review?
Most institutions treat research on distress as above minimal risk. The faculty standard should require at least departmental review, a distress protocol and signposting, with the exact route set by the institution’s own ethics policy.
Why does the guide not quote figures from Evans and colleagues?
Because students should open the original paper and report its sample and instruments themselves. The article is cited in the guide as a reference for that reading, not as a source of numbers.
What is the difference between wellbeing and satisfaction in a thesis?
Satisfaction is a rating of an experience, such as supervision. Wellbeing is broader and concerns how a person is doing. A proposal must say which one it measures and justify its instrument.
Who should supervise a wellbeing thesis?
A supervisor with methods experience in the chosen design and with knowledge of the institution’s support routes, backed by a second reader who can review the ethics and distress protocol.
How should small groups be reported?
Set a minimum cell size in the faculty standard so that tables by department, gender or disability cannot identify individuals, and apply it to appendices as well as the main text.