ITWF: Collaborative Research: African-Americans in IT: Improving the Graduate Education and Workforce Pipelines

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ABSTRACTITWF Program - FY04CNS 0418165, PI Wanda Smith, Virginia Polytechnic InstituteTitle: ITWF Collaborative Research: Collaborative Research: African-Americans in IT: Improving the Graduate Education and Workforce PipelinesCollaborative Projects:CNS 0418165, PI Wanda Smith, Virginia Polytechnic InstituteCNS 0417688, PI Vernard Harrington, Radford UniversityVirginia Polytechnic Institute and Radford University have been awarded an ITWF grant to conduct a collaborative research and implementation project whose primary goal is to promote and enhance the retention of African-Americans in the information technology (IT) workplace and professoriate. A model of Information Technology Career Resilience (ITCR) has been developed that describes how students select, persist in, and graduate from IT educational programs and then make the transition to the professoriate or the IT workplace. A three-year longitudinal study will test the model and its applicability to African-Americans. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its potential contribution to research in attraction and retention of minorities in science and engineering. The research team has defined a model of Information Technology Career Resilience that describes how students select, persist in, and graduate from IT educational programs and then make the transition to the IT workplace or the professoriate. This model integrates the strengths of three widely validated research perspectives: student retention, student involvement and attraction-selection-attrition. A three-year longitudinal study will collect data on social integration, academic major integration, IT-related factors, student characteristics, social integration, IT career resilience, job factors, organizational characteristics, values, the recruitment process, and satisfaction and retention. A range of sophisticated statistical techniques including hierarchical multiple regression, multiple discriminate analysis, and structural equation modeling techniques, will be used to test the ITCR model and its applicability to African-Americans. The broader impacts of the project lie with its potential for developing improved mentoring and educational programs that will benefit not only African-American students in IT but also non-minority students in IT. The project will also benefit the scientific, educational and business communities who are seeking to increase minority participation in IT.