Emotional Labour Experiences of UPSA Graduate Students

Project work supervision process is now considered as a conventional part of the curriculum of many courses available at institutions of higher education and has attracted a lot of attention from many institutions around the globe. The study focused on exploring the emotional labour experiences of UPSA graduates going through the supervision process. The study was purely qualitative. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were adopted in selecting eight (8) UPSA graduate students for the study. All respondents were engaged in an in-depth one-on-one interview using semi-structured interview questions. Data obtained from the interview was transcribed, coded and analyzed using thematic content analysis. From the data analysis, UPSA graduate students understood the meaning of emotional labour to be the inner feelings which was expressed either positively or negatively and how they were managed by faking ¿pretense¿, ¿keeping up appearances¿, and ¿putting up performance¿. It was evident that the two predisposing factors that caused them to engage in emotional labour experiences were university¿s culture and graduation requirement.