Research On The Relationship Between Postgraduates And Supervisors From The Perspective Of Social Exchange

Since the increase of collegeenrollment in1999, the population of Chinese college students has been rising. Graduate education, the highest level of Chinese educational structure, has attracted more and more attention. While the number of graduate students is growing, more concern is gradually attached to the quality of graduate education; more attention is paid to the relationship between tutors and graduate students, which is one of the important factors influencing the quality. The previous studies on tutor-student relationship mainly adopt the methods of empirical induction and speculative research, while, the other ways such as surveys and interviews are used less. Most studies still only focus on general description of tutor-student relationship, short of deep explanation and analysis. Most research perspectives of those studies concentrate on psychology and pedagogy rather than from the view of sociology, lacking in using some certain theory to describe and analyze the specific tutor-student relationship presenting in the real graduate education.From the perspective ofsocial exchange, this paper investigates the relationship between tutors and graduate students taking Nanjing Agricultural University for example.First of all, current situation of tutor-student relationship is investigated and analyzedmainly from three aspects:academic guidance, project cooperation, and daily life; second, the social exchange theory in sociology is adopted to explore specific exchanging processes between tutors and students and discuss the relative problems; finally, on the basis of investigation, detailed measures are offered to improve the tutor-student relationship, so as to provide some reference for establishment of harmonious relationship between tutors and graduates students.This study mainly uses the quantitative research method. Questionnaires are designed from the point of both tutors and graduate students, employing the random sampling method.Graduate students are divided into four typesaccording to different majors: agriculture, science, engineering and art. The number of graduate students of each type to fill in the questionnaires is based on a certain percentage. In total,258graduate students take part in the survey;49tutors are invited to fill in the teachers’questionnaires. Data is analyzedwith SPSS statistical software, findingthatthe relationship between the tutors and the graduate students in general is more or less equal and harmonious;however, some issues worth concerning are hidden behind therelationship, such as lack of academic guidance, inadequate exchange between teachers and students in daily life, ect. The process of exchange between tutors and students includes attraction, competition, differentiation and integration.Tutors and graduate students establish relationshipthrough mutual attraction.Due to different possessions of resources and status, differentiation of authority is generated between them. As a result, conformity of the relationship or conflict is aroused. In the exchange between tutors and graduates, some problems exist such as unequal rewards, competitionand discrimination from the similar groups, and the cognitive dislocation for exchange value between tutors and graduate students.At last, on the basis of the first two chapters about current status of tutor-student relationship and analysis of specific exchanging process, several measures are put forward to found harmonious tutor-student relationship, including the establishment of flexible two-way selection mechanism for tutors and graduate students; specification of respecting tutor-student interactive exchange value; using incentive system to fully mobilize the initiative of graduate students; setting up creative, reasonable and energetic competitive mechanism; building equal and smooth communication system.