Is My Blue Collar Showing? The Relationship Between Class, Motivation, and Imposterism in Working-Class Academics

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: With and About Higher Education Stakeholders

Abstract

Academics with working-class or lower-socioeconomic status backgrounds often feel like outsiders within the academy. We used a concurrent transformative mixed methods design to examine the relationship between academic career motivation, imposter phenomenon, first generation status, and lower-SES background among 182 self-identified working-class or lower-socioeconomic status background academics. Over 2/3 the sample had increased feelings of imposterism. Imposterism level was significantly related to feelings of autonomy, competence, relatedness, and cost value. A combination of competence, cost value, good luck, attribution of failure to ability, and attainment value predicts 54.2% of the variation in IP score. Participants describe their lived experiences as working-class or lower-SES academics as well as the ways they experience IP and strategies institutions should enact to ease IP.

Authors

• Ashley R Vaughn, Northern Kentucky University

• Marcus Johnson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Gita Taasoobshirazi, Kennesaw State University