"Untying Our Hands": A Mixed Methods Study of Strengths-Based Approaches to Faculty Recruitment and Hiring Practices in STEM for Equity
Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: As has been well documented in higher education, while the national demographics have continued to rapidly shift, the comparable student demographics have been slow to shift and faculty demographics have not kept pace. The attention on the inequities in the professoriate have been highlighted in the media, most prominently as a result of student protests and advocacy efforts pointing to the low numbers of faculty of color, specifically, and women faculty in certain fields including STEM. With hiring practices as one of the major gatekeeping routines between the PhD and the professoriate, scholars have pointed to strategies within recruitment and hiring that can innovatively be explored within the parameters of legal constraints experienced in some states, through Affirmative Action restrictions. Accordingly, this study explores effective approaches that STEM departments tending toward positive deviance are implementing to attract more women faculty and/or faculty of color. Using a convergent parallel mixed methods research design, this study leverages the results from a Zero Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) and Binary Logistic Regression Analyses of 10 years of job posting data (2006-2016) and insights from a comparative case study analysis of 5 STEM case studies at Midwestern University. The results indicate that effective recruitment and hiring of women faculty and/or faculty of color in STEM is facilitated through approaches in all four quadrants represented in the Competing Values Framework (CVF) – collaboration, competition, routines, and non-routines. The quantitative and qualitative findings together point to 3 broad thematic approaches of: necessary leadership, the search process itself, and focusing on organizational climate. Each of the thematic approaches highlighting individual efforts represented in the varying quadrants of the CVF. This study concludes with a set of praxis-based recommendations for campus and departmental leaders that are working to attract a more compositionally diverse faculty, and for scholars looking to further develop this line of inquiry.
Author: Aurora Kamimura
Language: English
Subfield: Applied Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3144413577