engleski

Mentoring of young natural and social scientists in Croatia

Marija Brajdić Vuković Institute for Social Research, Zagreb Mentoring of young natural and social scientist in Croatia Abstract Data gathered by relevant international studies proved that mentoring, whether formal in its origins or not, provided by experienced colleague scientist plays the key role in young researcher's successful professional socialization. But mentoring relationship defined as informal transfer of knowledge, social capital and psychosocial support, perceived by its recipient as relevant to his/her work and career (Bozeman and Feeney 2007), isn’t necessarily developing within a frame of a formal, institutionally based supervision. New research on the professional socialization of scientists suggests that traditional dyadic relationship is replaced by multiple, formal and/or informal, relationship with peer(s) and/or experienced colleague(s). This research deals with the empirical questions of occurrence of formal and informal mentoring relationships during process of young scientists’ professional socialization in natural and social sciences in Croatia. The research design of this study draws from the approaches that recognize science socialization culture as interplay of individual, institutional and disciplinary but also local and (inter)national cultural layers. The concept of the core egocentric network (McCallister and Fisher 1983) combined with understanding mentoring as career rewarding relationship, resulted in a goal to gather data on all possible mentoring relationships perceived as such by young scientist. Through in-depth interviews with 40 Croatian scientific novices, data on professional history was collected. The focus was on formal and informal relationships with important other (peer and experienced) scientists that had an influence on socialization process and its educational outcomes - early productivity and completion of original Ph.D. research. A questionnaire about respondent’s professional egocentric network was introduced at the end of in-depth interview and data on the scientific productivity of respondent and of alters - formal mentor(s) and research group – was also gathered. In spite of disciplinary differences, results show that research projects and teams that respondents are affiliated with are the most important socializing milieu for all young researchers. Moreover, the development of mentoring relationship within formal supervision proved to be the key to a successful socialization. Regardless of disciplinary differences, there are two most important characteristics of successful socialization environments - both depend on the project leader/formal supervisor of the young researcher. First characteristic is related to the project group as successful and stimulating social and intellectual environment. This feature evolves when the project leader is highly interested in research, cooperative and internationally connected person and a good project manager. Second quality of a good socialization environment is related to the development of mentoring within formal project supervision. It presupposes formal supervisor to be accessible, interested in young researcher’s professional development and that he/she systematically provides aid (knowledge, skills, social capital) for young scientist during research socialization.

Mentoring; Disciplinarity; Academic Career; Young Researchers; Professional Socialization

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