SBP: Socioeconomic Background, Class Identity Dissonance, and the Professional Development of Graduate Students in the Sciences

The aim of this project is to assess the experiences and obstacles faced by graduate students in science that result from their socioeconomic backgrounds, with the goal of identifying strategies that would help graduate programs and universities better serve and retain such students. Students pursuing an education and career in science can face many obstacles to their success.

Some of these obstacles can result from the student’s socioeconomic background. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who enter advanced education and training in graduate science programs face a social and cultural environment that is often dominated by those coming from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The disconnect between these students’ socioeconomic origins and that of their peers and faculty could lead to feeling like they do not belong within the scientific community.

This feeling could create a greater risk of these students leaving their graduate programs abandoning their careers in science and, in turn, harming the growth and innovativeness of the United States’ scientific workforce. Findings and recommendations from the study have potential to broaden participation in the sciences through addressing issues of engagement and involvement.

In this project a survey is designed and fielded among a sample of graduate students in five natural and social science disciplines: biology, physics, chemistry, psychology, and sociology. Twenty-five departments for each discipline, varying across program ranking, are randomly selected and a sample frame is built of graduate students in the programs.

Students are invited to complete a 15-minute survey and a subset of these are invited to participate in semi-structured interviews to supplement and enrich the quantitative survey data. This project is funded jointly by the Sociology Program and the Science of Broadening Participation Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.