Topic

Women in the Academic Pyramid: An Empirical Research on Female Engineering Faculty’s Research Self-Efficacy

Research Background

With the rapid development of engineering research and practice, the improvement of higher engineering education’s quality has received substantial attention around the world. In order to cope with the competition of the current large-scale innovative engineering talents training, it’s essential to accelerate to cultivate sufficient sophisticated engineering faculty with high engineering literacy, engineering educational capacity and engineering research and practical skills, and build up a sound system of engineering faculty training at universities.

In the meantime, though the number and proportion of full-time female faculty at universities have increased steadily, female faculty still face obstacles in career development, especially in the field of scientific and engineering research (Sun, 2012). Division of family responsibilities, the shackles of public opinion and cultural norms and other factors have caused the “accumulation of disadvantage” (Zuckerman, 1998) in research on female engineering faculty.

Theoretical Framework

Bandura (1977, 1986, 1997) presented an integrative theoretical framework of self-efficacy which specify its definition, dimensions, major sources and results. Self-efficacy refers to the degree to which an individual has confidence in his or her ability to achieve a certain behavioral goal in a particular field. Efficacy expectations differ in magnitude, generality and strength and self-efficacy has four principal sources of information which are performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. Bandura (1986) also advanced that self-efficacy can shape an individual’s behavioral choices, motivational efforts, cognitive processes, and emotional processes. Self-efficacy is regarded to have a direct impact on individual's psychological states in the process of achieving a certain goal, and the improvement of self-efficacy is of great significance to enhance work performance, motivation and attitude.

Concept Definition

In this empirical study, research self-efficacy refers to the confidence level of female engineering faculty at universities who can use their existing skills and abilities to complete various scientific research tasks.

Research Questions

The research questions of this study are as follows:

1)  What is the current status of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy at universities?

2)  What are the main factors that influence the female faculty’s research self-efficacy in engineering at universities?

3）What is the formation mechanism of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy at universities?

Main Content and Objectives

First, this study explores the status quo and characteristics of research self-efficacy of female engineering faculty. This study looks into the research self-efficacy among female engineering faculty at different career and life stages through quantitative analysis, and further form an overall profile of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy through the following qualitative interview.

Second, this study analyzes the different factors including external environmental factors and internal individual factors on the research self-efficacy of female faculty in engineering by means of quantitative analysis. At the same time, this study intends to explore the unique role of four major sources of self-efficacy, and summarizes the formation mechanism of female engineering faculty’s self-efficacy at universities through qualitative interviews.

This study further provides recommendations regarding the training strategy and policy for improving female engineering faculty’s academic career development.

This study employs explanatory sequential mixed methods design (Creswell, 2002), which uses quantitative data to demonstrate the overview result of research issues, followed by an in-depth interpretation through collection of qualitative data. This research only chooses female engineering faculty at Chinese universities as research object due to geographical convenience. However, this study intends to focus on the shared career developmental dilemmas, challenges and opportunities faced by female engineering faculty at universities worldwide instead of regional differences. First, in the quantitative research stage, this study randomly selects the appropriate number of Chinese universities in Shanghai and searches for all female engineering faculty’s resume on the official website homepage of their department or college to collect their basic information and individual contact method such as e-mail address. This study ultimately selects all female engineering faculty of four comprehensive universities in China with different research levels in Shanghai as the research sample and the sample size is approximately 1,040. Data collection is carried out through a structured questionnaire investigating the current status and influence factors of research self-efficacy of female faculty in engineering. The research self-efficacy scale are based on the classical Research Self-Efficacy Scale (Bieschke et al., 1996; Bishop & Bieschke, 1998). The revision of the questionnaire will be based on two round of expert reviews, peer debriefing, cognitive interviews, and a certain number of pre-interviews. This study uses STATA14.0 to analyze the quantitative data, and it is intended to use specific statistical analysis methods including descriptive statistics, factor analysis, correlation analysis and multivariate linear regression. Second, in the following qualitative research stage, this study employs maximum difference sampling, intensity sampling and snowball sampling strategies, and selects different types of interview participants with the most abundant information to conduct semi-structured interviews. The number of interview participants is designedly set from 15 to 20 according to previous studies with the similar topic. The interview outline will be on the basis of theory of self-efficacy and results of preceding questionnaire survey. This study further analyzes the formation mechanism of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy at universities, and how the self-efficacy influence themselves in reverse. MAXQDA2018 is used to systematically encode qualitative data with the system design through open coding, axial coding and selective coding (Creswell, 2012).

This study intends to probe the current status of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy. It further aims at exploring the main factors that influence female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy at Chinese universities in practice and the research results are expected to be extended to the other regions in the world. But beyond all that, this study also expects to summarize the formation mechanism of female engineering faculty’s research self-efficacy. Meanwhile, it is proposed to explore how the research self-efficacy of female engineering faculty influences their routine scientific research and academic career in reverse.

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