EXploring Collective Care in Research: A pilot-study with PhD Students (#ExCCiR-PhD)

Within the academic community, several studies point out that working towards a PhD is a particularly sensitive time, causing significant stress that affects the well-being of PhD students. While some actions are being implemented to support their mental and physical health, these actions and resources are still limited and no program has been designed and proposed in order to implement different individual and collective support modules.

This project aims to develop a well-being pilot-program for PhD students in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach in order to co-develop with all stakeholders concerned its content as well as the research protocol to assess it. The CRI ecosystem and the modules already proposed - in particular  positive psycho-education and Meditation-Based Stress Reduction techniques - will be at the heart of this pilot study, which will exploit the potential of digital technologies (hardware/software) to collect social, behavioral and physiological data, in order to analyze them with open and data science practices and identify relevant markers to assess its impact.

In addition to the social and pedagogical benefits, this study proposes to explore innovative perspectives in cognitive sciences on mind/body interactions and the role of interoceptive processes in emotional regulation and indirectly on well-being. This project will adopt mixed-methods (qualitative/quantitative) with the particular aim of bringing together various disciplinary fields and stakeholders and to propose a more comprehensive reflection on the necessary conditions for the implementation of an ethics of care in the context of digital and open research.