Abstract
It is well-documented that the representation of women and racial/ethnic minorities diminishes at higher levels of academia, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Sense of belonging—the extent to which an individual believes they are accepted, valued, and included in a community—is often emphasized as an important predictor of retention throughout academia. While literature addressing undergraduate sense of belonging is abundant, there has been little investigation of sense of belonging in graduate communities. Because graduate training is required to generate new scientific leaders, it is important to understand and address sense of belonging at the graduate level—paying explicit attention to devising strategies that can be used to increase representation at higher levels of academia. Here, a visual narrative survey and item response modeling are used to quantify sense of belonging among graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty within the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Results suggest that graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty all experience impostor phenomenon. Respondents struggle most with maintaining positive self-perceptions of their productivity, capabilities as a scientist, and success—particularly in comparison to their peers. Communicating about science with peers, talking about teaching hurdles, and engaging in mentoring relationships also contribute significantly to sense of belonging. Faculty members have the highest sense of belonging, while senior graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are least likely to feel a sense of belonging. Additionally, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who identify as underrepresented, as well as those who submit manuscripts for publication less than their peers, are less likely to feel a sense of belonging. This is the first study to generate a quantitative, nuanced understanding of sense of belonging within the entire graduate academic community of an R1 STEM department. We envision that these methods can be implemented within any research-focused academic unit to better understand the challenges facing community members and identify factors to address in promoting positive culture change. Furthermore, these methods and results should provide a foundation for devising interventions that academic stakeholders can use to directly improve graduate education.
Highlights
The underrepresentation of women and some racial and ethnic groups remains a significant, global issue in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields [1,2,3]
There are four Thurstonian thresholds for every survey question: threshold ‘a’ represents a 50% probability of endorsing a score of 1 or more on any given item; threshold ‘b’ represents a 50% probability of scoring 2 or more; threshold ‘c’ represents a 50% probability of scoring 3 or more, and threshold ‘d’ represents a 50% probability of endorsing a score of 4
Respondents who scored toward the top of the histogram in Fig 2 endorsed more items, and are probable to have higher sense of belonging than those who scored toward the bottom of the histogram
Summary
The underrepresentation of women and some racial and ethnic groups remains a significant, global issue in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields [1,2,3]. Sense of belonging is defined as the extent to which a person believes that they are accepted and included as a legitimate member of an academic community and that their presence and contributions to that community are valued [16,19,20,21] It encompasses the sociopsychological aspects of academic membership that are not directly related to intellect—such as a sense of shared identity, social connectedness with peers, and mental health [22]—and is known to negatively impact persistence among women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) in STEM [6,16,19,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]
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