| This study was conducted to determine the perceptions of doctoral candidates' research self-efficacy during their doctoral dissertation research. One hundred and twenty-seven doctoral students who had completed all their course work, including the comprehensive examinations, were sampled from the College of Education at The University of Akron. Ninety-seven usable questionnaires were returned, accounting for 76.4% return rate. The Research Self-Efficacy Questionnaire designed by the researcher was implemented to measure the research self-efficacy beliefs.;Three implications supported in the research literature were drawn from this study: (a) Emphasis must be placed on research skills to enhance research self-confidence. Although research training correlated significantly with research self-efficacy, performance in statistics independently accounted for a large difference in the research self-efficacy scores. This implies the need to intervene to improve achievement in statistics, (b) advisors need to ensure that advising is conducted through the framework of realistic goal-setting and goal attainment, and (c) a positive advisor-advisee relationship must be established through regular meeting schedules, performance feedback, and concrete suggestions. Further research is needed to verify the relationship between research efficacy and actual performance in the doctoral dissertation task.;From the analysis of data, research training and goal-setting significantly correlated with research self-efficacy while prior research experience, advisor-advisee relationships, outcome expectancies, and personal characteristics did not significantly correlate with research self-efficacy. A further analysis indicated that the doctoral candidates in this study exhibited high self-confidence in the literature review aspect of the dissertation activities, but were less self-confident in research design and data analysis. |
