Students from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds can experience stigma in undergraduate educational settings but little research on this topic has been conducted at the PhD level. Lower‐SES PhD students may feel lower levels of social integration as they experience incidents of interpersonal disconnection from others inside and outside of academia. Interpersonal disconnection may be a mechanism by which lower‐SES leads to a lower sense of social integration. In this prospective study of first‐year PhD students at three North American universities (N = 608), we assessed students’ perceived social integration and their interpersonal perceptions inside and outside of academia 2–8 times throughout their first year of graduate school. Relative to higher‐SES students, lower‐SES students perceived lower levels of social integration. They had difficulty making academic friends, felt dissimilar to their academic peers, and perceived a lack of understanding about their work in graduate school from non‐academic families and friends. They also lost non‐academic social ties. These interpersonal disconnections prospectively mediated the association between lower SES and lower levels of perceived social integration. Lower‐SES PhD students are at risk of impaired interpersonal relationships. Institutional policies to promote social connections among PhD students may help lower‐SES students integrate into academia.
- Award ID(s):
- 1922202
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10327846
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual meeting program American Educational Research Association
- ISSN:
- 0163-9676
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Purpose This quantitative study tested a conceptual model of academic belonging for undergraduate engineering students that hypothesized how intrapersonal and interpersonal variables predict belonging in engineering. The model proposed that engineering students' satisfaction with and valuing of their academic discipline mediate these predictors' effects on belonging.
Design/Methods This study sampled undergraduate engineering students (
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Conclusions Peer interaction was the most robust contributor to belonging, while faculty interaction and the value that students ascribe to their academic discipline predicted their sense of belonging in engineering. This work provides a novel model of belonging in engineering and its interpersonal and intrapersonal antecedents with educational, policy, and research implications to improve engineering students' belonging within their academic discipline.
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