Assessing engineering students’ identity and career supports

<p dir="ltr">Students with identities traditionally excluded from engineering face systemic oppression that impacts their belonging and persistence in engineering. Interventions that prioritize building “systems of support” have been found to successfully promote marginalized engineering students’ persistence. Despite a well-established need for increasing marginalized students’ support networks, there are still gaps in our knowledge on the support needed by engineering students, specifically in understudied and underrepresented populations. The purpose of this three-study dissertation is to assess engineering students’ access to identity and career-related supports using social capital theory-based methods. </p><p dir="ltr">The first study, a systematic literature review of 93 social capital assessments in higher education, explores the survey design and operationalizations used to assess social capital of students in higher education. From this review, survey designs that measured the interactions in a social network were the most common, but not the most aligned with social capital theory. This literature review sets the stage for study two, an instrument validation study on the career development supports in work-integrated learning programs, and study three, a narrative inquiry into the identity-specific supports available to nonbinary STEM students. Study two describes the development and validity evidence for the <i>Career Development Supports </i>survey—a social capital name generator that assess how mentors support career development. Results from study two indicate that the <i>Career Development Supports </i>survey has strong validity evidence to support its use in assessing how mentors support students’ self-efficacy, positive career outcome expectations and interest and goal development. Study three explores the types of identity-affirming support accessed by nonbinary STEM students through cisgender, transgender and nonbinary social networks. Findings from study three illustrate how cisgender, LGBTQ+, transgender and nonbinary individuals can support nonbinary STEM students’ identity development, influencing their career persistence and wellbeing. Together, these three studies further understanding of students’ social support through assessment strategies, work-integrated learning programs or nonbinary identity development.</p>