Creativity and Professional Identity Development in Undergraduate AEC Women
Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: civil/mechanical/industrial
Session: 1
Room: 3 - Hanover C
Victoria E. Reynolds - North Carolina A&T State University
Co-Author(s): Andrea N. Ofori-Boadu, North Carolina A&T State University; Rabiatu Bonku, North Carolina A&T State University
Although women’s involvement could reduce workforce shortages and increase diversity in innovation, they remain underrepresented in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) undergraduate programs and professions. Professional identity development (PID) theories postulate that positive interactions between personal attributes and PID increases persistence. Existing literature indicate that creative self-attributes influence AEC-PID in women. However, little is empirically known of the nuanced creative self-attributes (CSAs) that influence PID in undergraduate AEC women. The purpose is to examine nuanced CSAs that interact with PID in undergraduate AEC women. Therefore, utilizing purposive sampling, our mixed methods study involved thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews (N=41) and cross-tabulation analysis of Qualtrics-based surveys (N=37) for assessing interactions between nuanced CSAs and PID in undergraduate AEC women from five U.S. institutions.
Results revealed that nuanced CSA similarities and differences exist across the three AEC disciplines. Our CSA framework utilizes four CSA categories (Observing the Created Products; Appreciating Created Product Characteristics; Executing Creative Processes; Forming Creative Self-Concept) and three interaction strength (Perfect, Strong, Satisfactory) categories to rank interactions between nuanced CSAs and PID in undergraduate AEC women. The total interaction strength for all CSAs ranged between 73% and 100%, establishing the fact that RPs mostly agreed that these nuanced CSAs contributed to their AEC-PID. However, architecture and construction women are most similar in their tendency to associate their divergent reasoning to their own AEC-PID, while engineering women tended to associate their convergent reasoning to their AEC-PID. Furthermore, it appears that engineering RPs are more accommodating of divergent reasoning than architecture/construction RPs are of convergent reasoning.
Findings demonstrate AEC-relevant creativity pathways as critical in linking women to AEC professions. It contributes to ongoing work on understanding, investigating, and broadening participation of women in AEC professions by recommending tailored ‘creativity-enhancing’ interventions as viable for strengthening AEC-PID in undergraduate women. It informs the development and implementation of interventions and policies such as the recent CHIPS Women in Construction framework to broaden women participation in the AEC industry. In the long-term, AEC-relevant creativity pathways can increase women’s PID and persistence into the AEC workforce, increase diversity in AEC innovations, and reduce AEC workforce shortages. Future research will investigate how nuanced creative self-attributes evolve over time to influence AEC-PID in undergraduate AEC women.
Faculty Advisor: Andrea N. Ofori-Boadu, andreao@ncat.edu
Role: I conducted data analysis with Qualtrics crosstab tools, employed both descriptive and inferential statistics to estimate the total percentage of RPs agreeing and disagreeing to each CSA. Also described the gained insights from the research, which found the underlying relationships among the 4 CSA categories and AEC-personal identity development.