European Cross-National Mixed-Method Study on Early Career Researcher Experience

There is life after earning a PhD and, although research has not devoted great attention to it, this is a complex life, especially for those in a post-PhD research position at a university. While internationally there are many similarities in postdoc experience, in European countries the national policy contexts combined with the European Higher Education Area policies influence postdoc experience. After contrasting the European context with the North American one, we describe our mixed-method European cross-national research program (Spain, the United Kingdom, Finland, and Switzerland) in which the aim is to better understand the challenges postdocs confront in developing their career trajectories. With this as the background, we focus on a specific analysis of how different writing profiles (identified in the survey) relate to how participants deal with common or typical experiences involving written research communication (analyzed through multimodal interviews). We finish by discussing the strengths and limitations of the research approach.