Social Network Structures of Engineering Students with Disabilities

The following full research paper explores the social networks (friends, family, faculty, etc.) of engineering students with disabilities. Engineers are tasked with designing solutions for a diverse world, and yet the engineering workforce is disproportionately made up of white, able-bodied men. As such, a persistent challenge in engineering education is not only to attract marginalized students to engineering, but to ensure their degree completion and persistence in the workforce. One predictor of persistence in engineering is the development of an engineering professional identity: a measure of interest, belonging, and competence in engineering as a subject. Those with a stronger engineering professional identity tend to have longer careers in engineering. While using engineering identity to predict success is common, the factors affecting the development of engineering identity are still being analyzed and characterized. Previous studies suggest that robust social support networks can reinforce a sense of belonging in engineering, particularly for marginalized engineering students. The following work uses pilot data to characterize effective social networks of engineering students with disabilities by responding to the following research questions: (1) What is the strength and direction of the relationship between social network homophily and disabled engineering students' sense of belonging?, and (2) What is the strength and direction of the relationship between social network capital and disabled engineering students' sense of belonging? Participants from a mid-sized, MidAtlantic university completed a validated instrument measuring engineering identity. They were then asked to provide names or initials of up to ten people they consider their closest acquaintances-friends, family, professors, advisors, coworkers, or any other relationship the student considers their “supporters”. The participants additionally noted their relationship to each supporter, what form this support takes, whether or not this supporter is an engineer, whether or not this supporter has a disability, and the relationships between the supporters listed. From this information, the researchers constructed social networks for each participant and used social network analysis measures to characterize each individual's network of supporters. These measures included homophily (measure of similarity between people in the network) and social capital (measure of resources available to members of the network through their connections). Results indicate that engineering homophily (the percentage of the student's network also involved in engineering) was positively correlated to feelings of belonging, while the use of emotional support was negatively correlated to feelings of belonging.