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A psychologically safe environment is characterized by people who feel safe to voice ideas and concerns, willingly seek feedback, have positive intentions to one another, engage in constructive confrontation, and feel safe to take risks and experiment. Outside of academia, psychological safety has been shown to impact creativity, work performance, and work engagement. In academic research environments, faculty have a major leadership role in cultivating a psychologically safe environment amongst their academic research teams. Effective graduate student mentoring, which includes both career and psychosocial support, is critical to the development and retention of talented engineers in the US workforce. There is a need to better understand how engineering departments can cultivate more inclusive, psychologically safe environments in which graduate students feel safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking, especially in research settings. Guided by the Conservation of Resources theory, this project aims to address the following research question: What are the relationships between faculty advisor mentoring, doctoral student psychological safety, and the subsequent positive and negative outcomes for doctoral students? This work in progress paper presents the first quantitative phase of an explanatory mixed methods research design within the overarching project. The quantitative phase will address the following research aims: 1) Identify relationships between mentorship, psychological safety, and engineering doctoral student mental health, 2) Identify mentoring competencies that are predictive of research group psychological safety, and 3) Identify how different demographics experience mentoring and psychological safety in their research groups. Researchers developed a survey consisting of five pre-existing scales, four open-ended questions, and demographics questions. The scales include dyadic and team psychological safety, mentoring competency, mental health and well-being, and job stress. The survey was reviewed by graduate students outside of the participant pool at multiple institutions as well as an external advisory board panel and revised to improve clarity and ensure the selection of appropriate subscales. The survey will be administered via Qualtrics. Graduate students who have been enrolled in their doctoral program for at least one year and currently have a doctoral research advisor will be recruited to participate in the survey at four public, research-intensive institutions. The planned target sample size is 200-300 graduate students. This paper will present the design of the survey and preliminary survey results. As the first part of a larger mixed-methods study, the survey responses provide insight into graduate level engineering education and how doctoral students can be better supported.
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Latina Engineering Student Graduate Study Decision Processes – Development and Initial Results of a Mixed-Methods Investigation
Observations in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of a large land-grant university with approximately 20% Latina/o enrollment revealed that Latina engineering students are significantly less likely to attend graduate school than women from other ethnic or racial groups. This observation is consistent with national trends showing underrepresentation of Latina/o populations in STEM disciplines. With this motivating background, a study has been undertaken to explore the social, cultural, educational, and institutional factors affecting matriculation of undergraduate Latina engineering students into graduate engineering programs and/or industry careers. A research team was formed with four members (co-authors of this paper) from diverse backgrounds but a common commitment toward an asset-based approach that avoids marginalizing individuals in the research design process and by selecting respective methods. Results of these team discussions and decisions sought balance between various philosophical perspectives. This work-in-progress paper describes the mixed-methods research design considerations in formulating the study with emphasis on the quantitative portion. Detailed development of the qualitative portions of the study are still in progress and will be reported at future date.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2306262
- PAR ID:
- 10525469
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society for Engineering Education Paper ID #42415
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Graduate Study Latina Engineering Mixed-Methods Community Cultural Wealth
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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