Recent reports highlight a dramatic lack of diversity in both the clinical research (The National Research Council, 2006) and science and technology workforces (The National Research Council, 2011), with American Indian and Alaska Natives especially under-represented. Dramatic issues remain in attracting American Indian and Alaska Native students into behavioral and biomedical research careers. This project will examine factors that facilitate and impede academic perseverance and career achievement among American Indian students by tracking five cohorts of students to test a longitudinal model of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Factors explored as predictors of academic and career success include personal and contextual inputs, learning experiences, self-efficacy expectations, and outcome expectations as predictors of interest in, goals set, and actions taken to achieve behavioral and biomedical research careers. The project also aims to examine differences in important factors predicting success in academic perseverance and career attainment for American Indian behavioral and biomedical science majors versus American Indian non-science majors. Finally, the project aims to examine pathways by which American Indian students enter a research-intensive institution of higher educations. These efforts are intended to provide substantial information upon which interventions can be based, to increase the participation and perseverance of American Indian students in education and job-seeking within biomedical and behavioral science research.
The underrepresentation of American Indians in the biomedical and behavioral science research workforce is well recognized. This effort of this project to examine factors that facilitate and impede academic perseverance and career achievement among American Indian students is intended to provide substantial information upon which interventions can be based, to increase the participation and perseverance of American Indian students in education and job-seeking within biomedical and behavioral science research. Increased representation of American Indian researchers in biomedical and behavioral sciences can be expected to be associated with increased focus on issues of culture in health and well-being, with a particular emphasis on understanding the experiences of American Indian individuals.
