Institutional Support, Mentor Sponsorship, Department Climate, and Social Identities: Factors in Developing Academic Confidence of Doctoral Students.

Abstract

This dissertation examined the extent to which aspects of socialization in graduate school (i.e., institutional support, mentor sponsorship, and department climate), as well as individual factors (i.e., perceived importance of graduate experiences and group-based experiences), related to one another, and together predicted doctoral students’ academic confidence. Theoretically grounded in social identity theory and the theory of intersectionality, this study also aimed to assess whether an intersectional lens facilitates understanding how having multiple minority social identities relates to students’ graduate experiences and their academic confidence differently than having only one. Participants in the study were doctoral students from a large Midwestern research public university who completed the Graduate Student Climate Survey between 2009 and 2015. Structural equation modeling results indicated that proposed relationships among variables generally held true for all participants (n = 1066) regardless of gender, URM status, international status, and field of study. Specifically, institutional support, mentor sponsorship, and department climate were all positive predictors of academic confidence. Institutional support and mentor sponsorship were positively associated with each other, and both predicted department climate. Department climate was also a strong predictor of negative group-based experiences that students with more positive perceptions of department climate reported fewer negative group-based experiences. Additionally, results from multigroup analyses suggested that most of the predicted associations held for subsamples of interest, suggesting that the proposed links among elements of graduate socialization and academic confidence were generally applicable across groups. At the same time, average levels of group scores on key variables revealed that students with marginalized social identities reported more negative perceptions of socialization and group-based experiences, as well as less academic confidence than those with privileged identities. Limitations of the present study, as well as future directions, are discussed. Implications for doctoral education policies and practices are also outlined.