Research supervision styles in Iranian academia: from facilitation to exploitation!

number of postgraduate students has been growing exponentially in Iran in the last two decades. That is while the number of faculty has not increased proportionally to keep up with the fast growth. Hence, the student-faculty ratio has widened, turning thesis and dissertations into chaotic scene. Accordingly, this paper aims at uncovering how Iranian professors supervise postgraduate research projects in such a complex unprecedented context. The research participants are 45 postgraduate students who were selected purposively by criterion sampling strategy and interviewed by informal and in-depth techniques. Methodologically, the research may be deemed as grounded theory with emergent design (proposed by Charmaz). Thus, the data were analyzed at two levels, namely initial and focused (secondary) coding, and a quadripartite typology emerged consequently.