Family of Origin, Geographic Constraints, and Career Intentions of Graduate Students in the Sciences

由于这类职业的性质，寻求学术科学职业的个人对他们在哪里生活和工作没有太多的控制权。这对与他们的家庭和原籍社区有很强的社会、文化和心理联系的科学家提出了挑战。有理由相信，这种联系在科学界代表性不足的群体中尤为突出，例如来自种族和民族小组化群体的科学家。这项研究考察了这种家庭和社区关系如何潜在地影响和限制个人进入和停留在学术科学领域的能力。这项研究的结果突出了在增加科学劳动力的规模和多样性方面存在的未得到充分认识的障碍，以及克服这些障碍的潜在战略。本研究旨在了解研究生的地理位置与科学生涯决策之间的关系。为了评估这些问题，该项目对美国五个自然和社会科学学科的4000名研究生进行了抽样调查。受访者是根据项目排名从分层到分级随机选择的。研究人员将对选定的调查受访者进行50次半结构化访谈，为量化数据增加丰富的背景。该项目由科学科学、既定的激励竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)和社会学联合资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Individuals seeking careers in academic science do not have much control over where they live and work due to the nature of such careers. This presents challenges to scientists with strong social, cultural, and psychological connections to their families and communities of origin. There are reasons to believe that such connections are particularly salient among groups underrepresented in science, such as scientists from racially and ethnically minoritized groups. This research examines how such family and community ties potentially influence and restrict the ability of individuals to enter and stay in academic science. Findings from this study highlight underappreciated obstacles to increasing the size and diversity of the scientific workforce and potential strategies for overcoming those obstacles. This research aims to understand the relationships between geographical location and science career decisions among graduate students. To assess these questions, the project implements a survey on a sample of 4,000 graduate students in five natural and social science disciplines in the United States. Respondents are randomly selected from stratified to tiers based on program rankings. The researchers will conduct 50 semi-structured interviews with select survey respondents to add rich context to the quantitative data.This project is jointly funded by Science of Science, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Sociology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.