2026-09-20T14:49:44Zhttps://api.mountainscholar.org/server/oai/request

oai:mountainscholar.org:10217/2347672025-12-30T03:21:41Zcom_10217_100532com_10217_100000com_10217_100503com_10217_100303col_10217_100538col_10217_100504

Hosoi, Stefanie Aki, author Canetto, Silvia S., advisor Borrayo, Evelinn A., committee member James, Susan P., committee member Nerger, Janice L., committee member 2022-04-21T16:52:57Z 2022-04-21T16:52:57Z 2010 https://hdl.handle.net/10217/234767 https://doi.org/10.25675/3.018503 Covers not scanned. Over 50% of the students enrolled in engineering doctoral programs in the U.S. are foreign nationals, with the majority of these students coming from Asian countries (primarily China, Korea, India, and Taiwan). The present study was designed to better understand the factors that affect the persistence of women in engineering doctoral programs in the U.S., while explicitly examining how differences in students’ cultural backgrounds might influence the factors they perceive as important to their educational persistence. Individual interviews lasting 62 to 98 min were conducted with 16 participants enrolled in two U.S. universities. Ten of these participants were U.S. citizens of European American descent, and six were foreign nationals from five Asian countries (China, Korea, India, Taiwan, and Singapore). All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and then analyzed by team of trained coders using Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) as a qualitative framework. The results are discussed in two chapters. The first chapter focuses on the perceived challenges described by the 16 study participants, and shows that social contexts and psychological responses to these contexts interact to create challenges to persistence on an engineering educational career path. In the second chapter, factors that participants perceived as promoting their persistence on an engineering educational and career path are described, including both external support structures and psychological factors that motivate persistence. Similarities and differences between the themes that emerged from interviews with U.S. and Asian participants are discussed in both chapters, highlighting the implications of these themes for the development of interventions aimed at increasing women’s representation in doctoral level engineering careers. This paper concludes with a General Discussion, in which I provide an additional theoretical structure to these findings by examines the themes that emerged from the interviews in the context of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), and discuss the limitations of this research. doctoral dissertations English eng Colorado State University. Libraries Catalog record number (MMS ID): 991014659849703361 TA157 .H676 2010 2000-2019 Copyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright. Women engineering students Women in engineering Women in science Ethnicity -- United States -- Case studies Culture matters: factors affecting the persistence of European American and Asian women in two U.S. engineering doctoral programs Text Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Doctoral Psychology Colorado State University This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights (https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/). You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). open.access