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Institutional Ethnography as a Method to Understand the Career and Parental Leave Experiences of STEM Faculty Members
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Santiago, Marisol Mercado Pawley, Alice L. Hoegh, Jordana Banerjee, Dina |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | The majority of academic institutions have parental leave policies to help faculty members manage their career and personal life when they welcome a child as a new member of their family. These policies are gendered because they are experienced differently by women and men. Gendered patterns within organizations can influence on parental leave policies. Studying these structures can help us understand how gendered policies and benefits affect in the career and family life of faculty and staff members in ways that prescribe their experiences. Through the analysis of policy documents, in the context of faculty members’ experiences using them, we can see how institutions are structured in gendered ways, which might then yield different kinds of solutions to think about women’s underrepresentation in engineering. One of the research tools that academic leaders can use to study their institutional structure is institutional ethnography, proposed by Dorothy E. Smith. This research method can help researchers identify and analyze important key issues in the daily lives of their faculty and staff members who have been directly or indirectly impacted through the structure or implementation of the institution's policies. In this paper, we use institutional ethnography to investigate the parental leave policy of a Midwestern university with competitive science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs; our initial findings are focused on the analysis of this policy and its implications in the career and daily lives of STEM faculty members. We ground this paper on prior work presented at ASEE in 2010. Our data comes from 13 interviews of faculty and staff members in the time period of 20092010. Six interviewees are from STEM fields, three are administrators, and four are in nonSTEM fields. The interviews covered the topics of faculty and staff members' experiences in understanding, using, or implementing the parental leave policy, its procedures, and the effect of its implementation on personal and career lives. Initial common themes identified in our analysis phase are discussed. Our participants’ experiences will be discussed both in the context of the theoretical basis of institutional ethnography and Giddens’ theory of structuration. The contribution of this article can help other STEM higher education institutions to expand their view on the benefits that institutional ethnography might provide to the success of their STEM faculty and staff members and, thus, the translation of this to better services to STEM students. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://peer.asee.org/institutional-ethnography-as-a-method-to-understand-the-career-and-parental-leave-experiences-of-stem-faculty-members.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
