Measuring Research Mentors’ Cultural Diversity Awareness for Race/Ethnicity in STEM: Validity Evidence for a New Scale

Abstract

Research mentors are reticent to address, and sometimes unaware of how, racial or ethnic differences may influence their mentees’ research experiences. Increasing research mentors’ cultural diversity awareness (CDA) is one step toward improving mentoring effectiveness, particularly with mentees from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. The indicators of CDA for research mentors are not yet known. Thus, we developed a scale to assess CDA related to race/ethnicity (CDA–R/E) in research mentoring relationships informed by multicultural counseling theory and social cognitive theory. The validation process was guided by classical test theory and item response theory and involved qualitative data, cognitive interviews, and an iterative series of item testing with national samples of mentors and mentees. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced validity for a three-factor mentor scale assessing attitudes, behavior, and confidence, and a two-factor mentee scale assessing attitudes and behavior. The mentee version captures mentees’ perception of the relevance of culturally aware mentoring (“Attitudes”) and their perception of the frequency of mentor’s culturally aware mentoring behaviors (“Behaviors”). Implications for use of the CDA–R/E scale in practice, such as assessing alignment between mentor and mentee CDA scores, and use in future studies are discussed.