Characterizing engineering student social capital in relation to demographics

• Autores: Julie P. Martin, Shane A. Brown, M.K. Miller, Shannon K. Stefl
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 31, no. 4, 2015, págs. 914-926
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The primary goal of this paper is to explore the relationships between engineering undergraduate student demographiccharacteristics and the social capital these students utilize when making academic and career decisions. This multi-institution study is carefully aligned with the Network Theory of Social Capital. Employing cluster analysis to characterizeseveral key aspects of 1,410 undergraduate engineering students’ social capital–namely, the composition and character-ization of their social networks and indicators of their resource access–the authors explore latent patterns in the data, anduncover social capital profiles. These profiles are then related to demographic characteristics through additional statisticalanalyses. In particular, the paper investigates and challenges the theoretical notion regarding the significance of gender andrace/ethnicity in students’ social network characteristics and social capital indicators. Unlike other social capital work ineducation, this paper presents findings that gender and race/ethnicity are not significant or adequate for characterizing thesocial capital of engineering undergraduates.