Doctoral students’ satisfaction with research support services at public universities in Kenya

Abstract

Research support services (RSS) play an essential role in the lives of academics and researchers. The study focused on availability of RSS and doctoral students’ satisfaction with RSS provided in public university libraries in Kenya. The success of doctoral students is often determined by the extent of RSS provided by the university libraries. Every library system's main goal is to satisfy its patrons. Specifically, the paper was guided by these objectives: to assess the extent of provision of RSS in university libraries and to determine the level of satisfaction of doctoral students on available RSS. A sample size of 372 doctoral students were selected using stratified sampling and simple random sampling techniques, and 32 librarians were selected purposively from selected public universities in Kenya. This study adopted a descriptive research design and used an online survey research technique to collect data from doctoral students and librarians. Microsoft Excel and the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) were used to analyse the data. Findings indicate that a wide range of RSS were provided in the selected universities and that while doctoral students are satisfied with the availability of materials, they are not happy with the currency of the materials in the library. The study concludes that there were significant differences in the provision of RSS for doctoral students across the selected public university libraries and that doctoral students have varying levels of satisfaction with the research support services provided to meet their information needs at selected public universities. The study findings will help university libraries to improve their services, provide targeted services to doctoral students and develop frameworks that will guide in resource allocation.