A Demographic Approach to Studying the Process of Becoming a Scientist/Engineer

The author redefines career process as the collective experience of a birth cohort, and proposes a new demographic approach to studying the developmental process of becoming a scientist/engineer by following a synthetic birth cohort through its formative years of career development. The approach is dynamic rather than static, in the sense that it traces career changes over the life course of a cohort. At any given age, cohort members are identified as belonging to one of several states relevant to a scientific/engineering career. With data from longitudinal surveys, probabilities of cohort members' movements into and out of the different states are calculated as functions of age and population characteristics. From these transitional probabilities, the process of becoming a scientist/engineer is modeled assuming a time-inhomogeneous Markov process commonly seen in standard multistate life tables.