Visualizing Students’ Challenges and Emotions in Thesis Proposal Writing: A Photo-Voice Study

This study was focus on investigating students’ challenges and emotions experiences in writing a thesis proposal. The photo-voice method was used as a research design to visualize the experiences and facilitate obtaining detailed data from photographs, descriptions, and in-depth interviews with participants. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to six students who had completed their thesis proposals. This study found that students’ experiences on the challenges such as determining the research title, finding the relevant theories were online to the topic of the research, lack of English proficiency includes grammatical problems, lack of vocabulary, and identifying the appropriate references. Besides, emotions could change depended on the stages of during the thesis proposal writing process. The students experienced the negative emotions in the first stage, such as uncertainties, anxieties, tiredness, frustrations, and worries. It happened in the pre-writing stage. Then, gradually their emotions changed into positive such as cheerfulness, comforts, calmness, prides, and satisfactions in the while-writing and the post-writing stages. The negative emotions were caused by the students’ difficulties. Otherwise, the positive emotions arose after students’ thesis proposals had been completed and finished to be written, and finally, the thesis proposals were accepted by the lecturer.