The original Mentor Competency Assessment (MCA) scale was published as “The mentoring competency assessment: validation of a new instrument to evaluate skills of research mentors” in 2013 by Fleming et al. in Academic Medicine, a Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. The 26-item scale measured six sub-domains of mentor competency: maintaining effective communication, aligning expectations, assessing understanding, addressing diversity, fostering independence, and promoting professional development. The original MCA was used in the national longitudinal Enhance Diversity Study (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Faculty Annual Follow-up Survey 2017-2108 and 2019; National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) Annual Follow-up Survey 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2019) as part of the evaluation of the Diversity Program Consortium, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH U54GM119024).
Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) features a set of 10 linked awards granted to undergraduate institutions, each of which developed approaches intended to determine the most effective ways to engage students from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research. These awards also intend to prepare students to become potential future contributors to the NIH-funded research enterprise. The Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) at UCLA has been charged with conducting a longitudinal, multi-method evaluation of the BUILD programmatic interventions designed to diversify the biomedical workforce (Davidson, Maccalla, Afifi, et al., 2017). This technical report documents the methodology for the qualitative analysis employed by the CEC case study evaluation team. See our other white paper for details on the protocols and data collection process.