The IMPACT Study: Improving Mentorship Practice through Attributions and Conflict Training - Project Summary Many students in biomedical graduate programs have negative experiences with their research advisors, leading to worse well-being and lower success. Further, conflicts with advisors can be worse for biomedical graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities). Few intervention programs have examined how to improve student-advisor relationships in an ongoing, sustainable way. The current proposal aims to develop and test the effectiveness of a research advisor mentorship intervention with two complementary components: (1) attribution retraining, to encourage advisors to perceive their mentorship relationships as controllable and malleable in order to motivate them to improve their mentorship, and (2) conflict skills training, to equip advisors with specific and actionable ways to manage and resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise in these enduring relationships. A second goal is to examine whether a mentorship training program can be successful and sustainable with modest time and resource investments, to facilitate scale-up. Specific study aims are: 1) to develop, pilot test, and refine both light- and heavy-touch versions of a mentorship attribution retraining + conflict skills training intervention for research advisors; 2) to test the effectiveness of light-touch and heavy-touch interventions compared to a “no intervention” control group on mentoring relationship functions and quality as well as graduate students’ program satisfaction, scholarly productivity, and career intentions; and 3) to determine whether the effectiveness of either intervention is moderated by graduate students’ gender or membership in an underrepresented group (i.e., racial/ethnic minority, low socioeconomic status, disability status). To achieve these aims, iterative pilot work will be conducted to develop light- and heavy-touch versions of intervention materials. Then the effectiveness of both interventions will be tested by comparing them to a no-intervention control condition using a randomized experiment with 270 research advisors at a large U.S. research-intensive university. Both interventions will provide 8 hours of asynchronous content about attribution retraining and conflict skills training (1 hour per week); those in the heavy-touch condition will also attend a live, weekly 1-hour practice and discussion session (16 hours total). Advisors and students will be surveyed to assess any effects on the mentoring relationship. Effects on graduate student short- and long-term outcomes will also be assessed, including their scholarly productivity (e.g., presentations, publications), career intentions, and program satisfaction. Broadly, the project will demonstrate whether a novel intervention for research advisors improves graduate mentoring relationships and outcomes, and whether a light-touch version is sufficient to accomplish this.
