Students face multiple stressors while earning their doctorates. Since peer support is a common recommendation for easing this stress, we realized graduate students, faculty, and academic program administrators might have interest in how our cohort used group messaging to facilitate peer support early in our studies. We conducted a thematic analysis examining how group messaging helped new doctoral students in a hybrid program maintain ongoing engagement with course content and build interpersonal relationships. McClusky’s Theory of Margin provided a theoretical framework for this project. Results of thematic analysis emphasize that students utilized this communication medium to reach out to peers for support and to form interpersonal relationships with peers at a distance.

学生在获得博士学位时面临多重压力。由于同伴支持是缓解这种压力的常见建议，我们意识到研究生、教师和学术项目管理人员可能对我们的队列如何在研究早期使用群组消息来促进同伴支持感兴趣。我们进行了一项主题分析，研究群消息如何帮助混合计划中的新博士生保持对课程内容的持续参与并建立人际关系。McClusky 的保证金理论为这个项目提供了一个理论框架。主题分析的结果强调，学生利用这种沟通媒介向同龄人寻求支持，并与远距离的同龄人建立人际关系。