The currency of research access: how undergraduates leverage social capital to gain research experience

Science students who engage in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) benefit in numerous ways, including persisting in science at a higher rate compared to students who do not participate in UREs. However, UREs are a limited commodity and competition for access to these opportunities necessitates further investigation into why certain students succeed in accessing UREs, while others do not. Social capital, or the resources that students extract from their relationships with others, may play a key role in determining who engages in UREs. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with students who had recently started UREs (n = 21). Informed by Lin’s conceptual definition of social capital, we qualitatively analyzed these interviews to characterize the social capital that science undergraduates found useful for accessing research. Students described accessing UREs by leveraging ten unique forms of social capital that reflected Lin’s theorized utilities of social capital. Specifically, students described utilizing social capital to garner information about UREs and how to best navigate the path to accessing them, to reinforce their confidence in pursuing UREs, to influence the views of opportunity holders, and to serve as social credentials lending credibility to their aptitude for research. Although students detailed how faculty served as sources of all of these forms of capital, they also described advisors, employers, peers, and family as influential sources. Furthermore, their institutions served as a source of capital, and students themselves engaged in a variety of proactive behaviors to access UREs. Here we describe the forms and sources of social capital that science undergraduates use to access research, which can be used as an operational definition of the construct. Such a definition is necessary for future research aimed at measuring social capital for undergraduate research and identifying its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. We also describe how institutions can serve as sources of capital, and how students’ proactive behaviors play a role in their pursuit of UREs. This work provides an important starting point for determining the influence of social capital in accessing UREs and further broadening access to research in the sciences.