The Supervisor's Role in Facilitating the Doctoral Student's Identity Development

In this reflective essay I discuss possible avenues for how the supervisor(s) of a doctoral candidate can contribute to the candidate’s identity formation as a researcher, and their socialization into a larger academic context. I discuss the doctoral education as identity work, relational aspects of the supervision process, and finally argue that tenets from the self-determination theory can be used as a guiding framework to understand which factors and drivers are important in the doctoral student’s identity development process. I conclude by discussing how such a framework can be useful for a reflective practice in doctoral supervision.