Professional Identity Development Among Business Doctoral Students: A Social Networks Perspective
Open Access
- Author:
- Sweitzer, Vicki Lynn
- Graduate Program:
- Higher Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 07, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Carol L Colbeck, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lisa R Lattuca, Committee Member
Robert D Reason, Committee Member
James R Detert, Committee Member - Keywords:
- doctoral education
social networks
professional identity
preparing future faculty - Abstract:
- This dissertation explored longitudinally how the friendship, advice, and developmental support provided by peers, faculty, family, friends, and business associates facilitated doctoral students’ early professional identity development leading to persistence to degree or eventual withdrawal in a business doctoral degree program. The case study involved 12 doctoral students enrolled in five business disciplines at a top ranked research university and business college. This research was grounded in four key theories: mentoring, social network, role, and professional identity. Major concepts explored in this study included students’ individual characteristics, their developmental networks and interactions with network partners, the role socialization process and the learning the occurs as a doctoral student, research assistant, and teacher, and how students begin to identify or disidentify with these roles as important to professional identity development and eventual persistence or withdrawal. The study proposes relationships among these concepts and explores students’ changes and development over time. The research question that guided this study is: How does the friendship, advice, and developmental support provided by peers, faculty, family and friends, and business associates facilitate doctoral students’ professional identity development and eventual persistence or withdrawal in doctoral degree programs? Data collection included interviews with the focal doctoral students, their self-identified network partners, and other Valley faculty and administrators, direct observations of college-wide orientations, and content analysis of Valley documents. A series of three interviews were conducted throughout the first year of study (September 2005, January 2006, May 2006) to capture students’ development and changes throughout the first year. Each student interview elicited information regarding students’ goals, definitions of success, their personal relationships, the expectations communicated to students by those relationships, and how they identified with the roles of doctoral student, research assistant, and teacher. In the final interview, students were asked to discuss how the first-year experience served as a preview of the faculty career. Network partner interviews were conducted during the Spring, 2006 semester and were used as an opportunity to assess consistency (or inconsistency) in students’ and network partners’ perceptions, as well as to learn more about the Valley culture. Because the study was longitudinal, data analysis was an on-going process. Individual write-ups were created for each student at each interview time that served as stand alone entities (Eisenhardt, 1989). Included in each student write-up were data from corresponding network partner interviews and drawings of students’ developmental networks. Interviews were analyzed to assess changes in students’ developmental networks, perceptions of network partner expectations, and early professional identify developmental in the roles of doctoral student, research assistant, and teacher. The doctoral students differed in terms of their developmental networks (i.e., the network partners they chose to identify as important to first-year success). These differences in developmental networks were associated with variations in support provided to students; expectations communicated by network partners; socialization in the roles of doctoral student, research assistant, and teacher; and students’ resulting conceptions of the faculty career. Two overall groups of students emerged based on these differences: Perceiving Fit and Assessing Fit. Fit, for the purposes of this study, is defined as congruence between students’ goals for performance, placement, and weighting of academic roles with Valley’s goals for student performance, placement, and weighting of academic roles. I developed two models of doctoral student professional identity development (Perceiving Fit - Figure 8-1; Assessing Fit - Figure 8-2) which posit that the process by which most doctoral students begin to develop professional identities as future faculty members is explained, in part, by their susceptibility to socialization, individual differences such as learning orientation and, by the relationships they develop and maintain during their doctoral education experiences. I propose working propositions and future research related to the five key findings from the study: socialization susceptibility, emotional support, goal orientation, role prioritization and fit, and professional identity development. I also include practical implications which include the need for doctoral programs to create policies at the college and program levels to monitor student progress throughout all stages of the doctoral student experience, the need for doctoral programs to acknowledge work-personal balance issues by incorporating family relationships into the academic community, and recommend that doctoral programs create formal developmental networks for all students.