Postgraduate Students’ Views on Mentoring in the Educational and Academic Context

Mentoring has been a highly discussed issue in the education literature lately. This study explored Greek postgraduate students’ views regarding mentoring in Greek primary and higher education. Unlike previous research, in the present study we did not use predefined themes or definitions to explore mentoring. Instead, the purpose was to allow participants’ definitions and opinions about the issue to emerge. Therefore, the spontaneous texts written by the participants during an hour were used as a research tool, while the 38 written texts accumulated were analyzed by the qualitative content analysis method. Findings indicated that the prevailing themes of mentoring in the literature, such as mentoring functions, outcomes, and purposes, were referred by the participants. Despite the similarities found for mentoring in both contexts studied, some differences also emerged, concerning the type of the mentoring relationship preferred and the purposes of mentoring in each context. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications.