90P
Meeting Halfway: Making Mentoring Successful in Social Work Doctoral Programs
Research has linked positive doctoral student-faculty relationships to increased student productivity and overall “success” in the doctoral program (Powers & Swick, 2012). Despite this understanding, there has been insufficient exploration of the qualities and substance of a positive mentoring experience - particularly in schools of social work. The purpose of this study is to identify qualities and characteristics of effective and positive student-faculty mentoring relationships and the institutional factors that can facilitate supportive mentoring environments. Demystifying the characteristics of positive and supportive faculty and doctoral student mentoring relationships will contribute to critical conversations on ways to foster relationships that are mutually beneficial and ultimately expand the body of literature focused on mentoring in social work doctoral programs.
Methods:
Data was collected from 16 key-informant interviews with tenured doctoral faculty in a school of Social Work at a research-focused university. Junior faculty opted not to participate. We used a semi-structured interview guide to elicit faculty members’ conceptualizations of doctoral mentoring, qualities of positive mentoring relationships, and relevant institutional supports. Most interviews (n=15) were conducted in person. Interviews were professionally transcribed verbatim.
We utilized multiple rounds of coding to facilitate the thematic analysis process. Using a codebook, we inductively assigned codes to key constructs in the data, clustering them into categories of similar constructs. Matrices comparing codes within and across interviews were created to highlight key social processes. We met throughout the analysis process to solicit a diversity of interpretive viewpoints, ensure coding congruence, and participate in active reflexivity. Data was organized and analyzed using Dedoose.
Results:
The themes could be clustered in the following domains: importance of shared interests and reciprocity, need for students to proactively drive the relationship, faculty being intrinsically motivated to mentor, limited institutional support or reward for mentoring, and the need for specific support for international and underrepresented students that is not always clear across faculty. While faculty emphasized the importance of being supportive, they underscored that students need to proactively drive the relationship. Institutional supports such as course “buy-out,” mentoring guidelines, and supporting junior faculty were referenced as potential institutional supports to facilitate mentoring. Participants predominantly reported the necessity for faculty to be intrinsically motivated and personally fulfilled by mentoring in order to engage in a mentoring relationship. There was some articulation of specific areas of support to be mindful of when mentoring international and underrepresented students including providing personal support, listening, networking, and navigating systems to promote career aspirations.
Conclusion/implications:
These findings point to several concrete areas for strengthening the knowledge base on mentoring in doctoral programs: including balancing productivity with relationship building, providing faculty with tangible strategies for supporting underrepresented students, and the importance of fostering a school culture where mentoring was valued and expected across all faculty. These findings and implications will be used as a platform to have an in-depth discussion on the current climate of mentoring at research universities and strategies for strengthening these important relationships. A framework will be provided for how this research was conceptualized, operationalized, and measured.