Cultural Capital Enrichment of Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates

¶ … Cultural Capital Enrichment of Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates

by Sarah M. Ovink and Brian D. Veazey

The study in the paper presented above focuses on what the authors call an area of "acute concern," namely the "lack of underrepresented minority (URM) students pursuing careers in scientific and biomedical fields."

The paper follows a very organized outline that mirrors the conventional research article form, which starts with an introduction, and continues with a review of literature, and various other analysis in regards to the research question, such as methodology, results, discussion and conclusions.

The essay's introduction is very comprehensive and does provide a thesis statement, thereby clarifying the purpose of the essay. According to the authors, the study is needed because of the fact that minority participation in "doctoral-level scientific or biomedical research" is not only underrepresented, but, according to the authors, it can broaden scientific inquiry and thereby serve to better equip the field to answer some of the most important questions today. Furthermore, such representation would also better serve "population-specific health concerns of these most vulnerable groups" (Ovink and Veazey, 2010).

The authors then proceed to follow the structure of a review of literature, and provide references from various sources, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and other authors who have expertise on the issue discussed. Furthermore, all of these sources are relatively recent, ranging from 2005 to the present, though one of the quoted sources is from 1973, but this appears only once, thus making this section appear as a good basis for further commentary.

After the comprehensive literature review the reader follows a conceptual framework, which aims to explain how social capital can function to better society, and this is related to the issue of differential outcomes, race and community, and a strong assertion that "minority […] must struggle not only to acquire the economic capital necessary to attain a college education, but also the cultural capital that more privileged students simply inherit" (Ovink and Veazey, 2010).

The paragraphs that follow present analysis on proposed methods, with a specific focus on research methods, which explain the data sampling technique, and data collection and analysis further, and very comprehensively. Though the authors include sometimes paragraphs of quotations that could be more succinctly summarized, these sections of further description and analysis provide for a clear understanding of the subject, and do not allow for any gaps in research, as well as constantly reiterate the purpose of the paper so as to remind the audience. In short, the latter sections of the paper form a clear, cohesive presentation of strategies utilized to study and give fantastic recommendations on the problem in the discussion and conclusion sections.