2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Development of a climate survey for engineering doctoral students from an intersectional approach: Second-round validity evidence

Presented at GSD 4: Stressors and Supports

This paper describes the ongoing development of a multi-factor organizational climate scale for engineering doctoral students. Organizational science combined with an intersectional approach can help identify the climates contributing to students’ organizational commitment and retention, especially among students from historically-excluded groups. Following initial scale development, which piloted the scale with 287 engineering doctoral students from 28 U.S. institutions, followed by phenomenological interviews with 11 students with minoritized sexual identities in 2023, we administered a revised scale to n = 288 students from 12 U.S. institutions in 2024. Intersectionality guided the identification of climate constructs, the creation of items for the constructs, and the refinement of those items based on preceding phenomenological interviews. The revised scale comprised 43 items assessing eight focused climates. Exploratory factor analysis identified six latent factors, such as perceived cultural diversity, diversity, performance, authenticity, organizational support, and psychosocial safety with 36 items. Although the literature differentiates between psychological safety climate and mastery climate, the items for the two constructs did not group together. Therefore, these scale items will be revised for the next round of validity study. The six factor scale showed excellent internal consistency reliability. Results from this scale have practical implications, indicating specific policies, practices, and procedures that shape doctoral student retention and commitment to degree completion.

Authors

Dr. So Yoon Yoon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1868-1054 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. So Yoon Yoon is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering and Computing Education in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA. Dr. Yoon received her Ph.D. in Gifted Education, and an M.S.Ed. in Research Methods and Measurement with a specialization in Educational Psychology, both from Purdue University, IN, USA. She also holds an M.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics and a B.S. in Astronomy and Meteorology from Kyungpook National University, South Korea. Her work centers on elementary, secondary, and postsecondary engineering education research as a psychometrician, data analyst, and program evaluator with research interests in spatial ability, STEAM education, workplace climate, and research synthesis with a particular focus on meta-analysis. She has developed, validated, revised, and copyrighted several instruments beneficial for STEM education research and practice. Dr. Yoon has authored more than 85 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings and served as a journal reviewer in engineering education, STEM education, and educational psychology. She has also served as a PI, co-PI, advisory board member, or external evaluator on several NSF- and NASA-funded projects.
Dr. Julie Aldridge http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6655-5971 The Ohio State University [biography]

My background and research interests are in organizational change, innovation, and leadership. My strengths are ideation and transdisciplinary teamwork. My current work focuses on organizational climate to better support the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse groups to degree completion.
Nicole M. Else-Quest http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4177-2395 University of California, Los Angeles [biography]

Nicole M. Else-Quest is Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. A first-generation college student, Dr. Else-Quest earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to understand psychological gender differences, how they develop and shape participation in STEM, and how we can intervene to expand women's and girl's participation in STEM. She has written extensively on implementing intersectionality within social sciences research and adapting quantitative as well as qualitative methods to do so. Else-Quest is currently PI on two grants from the National Science Foundation, both focused on developing and implementing interventions to improve girls’ and women’s participation and persistence in STEM education from elementary school through doctoral training. In addition to her scholarly work, she is author of the undergraduate textbook, Psychology of Women and Gender: Half the Human Experience+ (Sage, 2025). She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Joe Roy American Society for Engineering Education [biography]

Joseph Roy has over 15 years of data science and higher education expertise. He currently directs three national annual data collections at the ASEE of colleges of engineering and engineering technology that gather detailed enrollment, degrees awarded, research expenditures, faculty headcounts, faculty salary and retention data for the engineering community. He is PI of a NSF Advanced Technological Education funded grant to build a national data collection for engineering-oriented technician degree and certificate programs at 2-year institutions. Prior to joining the ASEE, he was the senior researcher at the American Association of University Professor and directed their national Faculty Salary Survey. He also developed a technical curriculum to train analysts for a national survey of languages in Ecuador while he was at the University of Illinois as a linguistic data analytics manager and member of their graduate faculty. He has a B.S. in Computer Science & Mathematics, a M.S. in Statistics from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

« View session