Pathways To Empowerment: A Grounded Theory Study Of Pakistani Female Doctoral Students In Malaysian Public Universities
Loading...
Date
2018-05
Authors
Hyder Shah, Syed Faisal
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
In Pakistan, women have fewer opportunities for higher education than men. Additionally, a few women have a chance to avail foreign higher education. There are number of structural and socio-cultural barriers that impede women’s access to higher education. However, due to unprecedented importance of higher education, a few women strive and succeed to avail educational opportunities abroad where they also come across myriad challenges. To this end, the present study primarily aims to explore the challenges that Pakistani female students experience while pursuing their doctoral education in the selected universities of Malaysia. Moreover, this study explores their coping strategies to overcome such challenges as well as the reasons why these students choose Malaysia as their higher education destination. To achieve these objectives, the present study conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 Pakistani female doctoral students who were purposively selected from the four public universities in Malaysia. The data was analyzed in NVivo (11 pro) using Grounded Theory methodology and procedures i.e., Open, Axial, and Selective coding on all transcribed interviews. Four main themes emerged from the data, i.e., academic, social, personal, and Malaysia. These four themes captured respondents’ experiences and coping mechanism adopted during their doctoral journey till the time of the interviews. This study has developed a substantive Theory of Pathways to Empowerment taking Pakistan and Malaysian educational contexts as a case in point. The emerged theory provides a new dimension to knowledge in social work particularly the way these Pakistani female doctoral students manage and transform their personalities in a different country while undergoing psychosocial challenges of acculturation and academic challenges. As the emerged theory also illustrates social work concepts of self-empowerment and resilience strategies, such knowledge can be used by practitioners to incorporate it into their interventions to vulnerable groups, including international students.
Description
Keywords
Pakistani female doctoral students , in Malaysian public universities