EAGER: Mentoring, Networks, and Under-represented Minorities in the Science Pipeline

根据最近的报告，辅导是增加代表不足的少数群体在科学管道中所占份额的不可或缺的一部分。联邦政府和私人基金会都投入了数百万美元，为代表不足的少数族裔提供培训和指导，但几乎没有关于这些项目是否在提高科研人员的留职率和生产率方面取得了回报的信息。虽然辅导已经成为研究生培训的一种常态，但它目前的概念化是有限的。辅导通常被认为是导师和学员之间的一种二元关系，而不是一个具有联系模式的动态复杂的网络系统。35岁的美国社会学协会少数民族联谊会S(音译)试图创建这样的网络。这项探索性研究的目的是将MFP网络成员的职业轨迹、科学生产力、变革性奖学金和纪律服务方面的结果与其他群体的结果进行比较。这个项目是探索性的，因为主要研究人员需要确定是否可以以可接受的成本获得关于MFP研究员和其他比较小组的足够数据，以及这些数据是否可以用于指导、协作和生产力网络的比较研究。如果成功，这项探索性研究应该有三个结果。首先，它可以为研究其他STEM学科中的指导网络的结构和有效性提供一个模型。其次，它的发现可以被用来建议一些改变，以提高对代表不足的少数群体的科学指导计划的有效性。另一个贡献是开发和应用新的方法来衡量辅导，以提高我们描述和分析少数群体社会学家之间的联系和联系的能力。完成后，这项比较研究可以告诉我们MFP辅导网络所增加的价值。

According to recent reports, mentoring is integral to increasing the share of under-represented minorities in the science pipeline. Both the federal government and private foundations have put millions of dollars into training and mentoring programs for under-represented minorities with little information about whether these programs have paid off in terms of increasing retention and productivity in the scientific workforce. Although mentoring has become a norm of graduate training, its current conceptualization is limited. Mentoring is usually thought of as a dyadic relationship between mentor and mentee rather than a dynamic and complex networked system with patterns of linkages. The American Sociological Association?s 35 year-old Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) attempts to create such networks. The purpose of this exploratory study is to compare outcomes in terms of career trajectories, scientific productivity, transformative scholarships, and disciplinary service of members of MFP networks with outcomes of other groups. This project is exploratory because the principal investigators need to determine whether enough data on the MFP Fellows, as well as the other comparison groups, can be obtained at an acceptable cost, and whether these data can be used in a comparative study of mentoring, collaboration, and productivity networks.If successful, this exploratory study should have three outcomes. First, it can provide a model for studying the structure and efficacy of mentoring networks in other STEM disciplines. Second, its findings can be used to recommend changes that can increase the effectiveness of scientific mentoring programs for under-represented minorities. An additional contribution is to develop and apply new approaches to measuring mentoring in order to improve our ability to describe and analyze the ties and linkages among minority sociologists. When completed, this comparative study can tell us the value added by MFP mentoring networks.