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Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates

Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hyp...

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Autores principales: Smith, Chrystal A. S., Wao, Hesborn, Kersaint, Gladis, Campbell-Montalvo, Rebecca, Gray-Ray, Phyllis, Puccia, Ellen, Martin, Julie P., Lee, Reginald, Skvoretz, John, MacDonald, George
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8203332/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34136561
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.671856
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author Smith, Chrystal A. S.
Wao, Hesborn
Kersaint, Gladis
Campbell-Montalvo, Rebecca
Gray-Ray, Phyllis
Puccia, Ellen
Martin, Julie P.
Lee, Reginald
Skvoretz, John
MacDonald, George
author_facet Smith, Chrystal A. S.
Wao, Hesborn
Kersaint, Gladis
Campbell-Montalvo, Rebecca
Gray-Ray, Phyllis
Puccia, Ellen
Martin, Julie P.
Lee, Reginald
Skvoretz, John
MacDonald, George
author_sort Smith, Chrystal A. S.
collection PubMed
description Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hypothesize that women and URM students engineering students who participate in PEOs are more likely to persist in their engineering major and that PEOs contribute to their persistence by providing them access to insider information that supports their persistence. Each year for five years we administered surveys with closed- and open-ended items to examine the association between participating in PEOs and the persistence of a cohort of engineering majors from 11 diverse universities. We used logistic regression and thematic analysis to analyze the data. URM students who participated in PEOs and other engineering related activities were more likely to persist to the second year than URM students who did not (adjusted odds ratio = 2.18, CI: 1.09, 4.37). Students reported that PEOs contributed to their persistence by enabling them to network, reduce gender and race/ethnic isolation, and access professional resources. URM students should be encouraged to participate in PEOs beginning in their first year to increase their integration in their major, which we have found to increase their persistence.
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spelling pubmed-82033322021-06-15 Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates Smith, Chrystal A. S. Wao, Hesborn Kersaint, Gladis Campbell-Montalvo, Rebecca Gray-Ray, Phyllis Puccia, Ellen Martin, Julie P. Lee, Reginald Skvoretz, John MacDonald, George Front Sociol Sociology Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hypothesize that women and URM students engineering students who participate in PEOs are more likely to persist in their engineering major and that PEOs contribute to their persistence by providing them access to insider information that supports their persistence. Each year for five years we administered surveys with closed- and open-ended items to examine the association between participating in PEOs and the persistence of a cohort of engineering majors from 11 diverse universities. We used logistic regression and thematic analysis to analyze the data. URM students who participated in PEOs and other engineering related activities were more likely to persist to the second year than URM students who did not (adjusted odds ratio = 2.18, CI: 1.09, 4.37). Students reported that PEOs contributed to their persistence by enabling them to network, reduce gender and race/ethnic isolation, and access professional resources. URM students should be encouraged to participate in PEOs beginning in their first year to increase their integration in their major, which we have found to increase their persistence. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-05-31 /pmc/articles/PMC8203332/ /pubmed/34136561 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.671856 Text en Copyright © 2021 Smith, Wao, Kersaint, Campbell-Montalvo, Gray-Ray, Puccia, Martin, Lee, Skvoretz and MacDonald. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Sociology
Smith, Chrystal A. S.
Wao, Hesborn
Kersaint, Gladis
Campbell-Montalvo, Rebecca
Gray-Ray, Phyllis
Puccia, Ellen
Martin, Julie P.
Lee, Reginald
Skvoretz, John
MacDonald, George
Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title_full Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title_fullStr Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title_full_unstemmed Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title_short Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates
title_sort social capital from professional engineering organizations and the persistence of women and underrepresented minority undergraduates
topic Sociology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8203332/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34136561
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.671856
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