Over the past 30 years, research on how college impacts student development has continually pointed to the peer group as perhaps the dominant change agent during the college years. A college student's peers act as a reference group, or an environmental source of sociocultural norms in the midst of which a student grows and develops (Clark & Trow,…

Women continue to receive fewer doctoral and first-professional degrees than men, even though women receive more bachelor's degrees. The underrepresentation of women holds even after allowing for time to complete an advanced degree. Although researchers have examined sex and racial/ethnic group differences in undergraduate enrollment (e.g.,…

This article continues a series of analyses using the "theory of careers" developed by John Holland to examine the patterns of student stability and change inherent in the college experience--as part of an effort to understand the satisfaction, learning, and retention of college students. The underlying basis of Holland's theory is that human…

This article describes how long-term collaborators interpret substantive differences of opinion and the strategies they use to negotiate them. Long-term collaborators are coauthors who have had a working relationship for ten or more years. Differences of opinion refer to differences in interpretation about substantive issues related to research…

In recent years, many colleges and universities have set out to reform or revisit their general education curricula. These efforts often have failed to achieve the comprehensive change that reformers originally had envisioned. Using the example of one case, this paper explores how institutionalized organizational elements and politics can shape…

The findings reported here are part of a larger study that examined how faculty view the linkages between themselves and their institutional work environments; how they create a sense of personal space and belonging within their academic units and the larger university; and how their self-perceptions of organizational fit affect their professional…

The study presented in this article focuses on three questions: (1) What elements of current leadership models appear most salient in guiding large-scale technology implementation efforts? (2) Which factors affecting the change process seem most important to participants in the context of technology change, and how do they describe them? and (3)…

This study argues that significant improvements in education can be made only if there are drastic improvements in the life circumstances of America's lower classes. Improving the life circumstances of the lower classes also means providing their schools with the resources they need. And not least in this new outlook on education is the need to…

This article uses the discipline of history to explore these questions. While not a teeming group, historians of higher education have employed their disciplinary lens to advance several lines of significant postsecondary inquiry (for example, issues of access, social mobility, professionalism, gender, and regionalism). This article first traces…

This article seeks to isolate one major strand of work in American cultural anthropology together with its implications for the study of higher education. While the number of anthropologists who do research on higher education is fairly small, the importance of the field's theoretical and methodological contributions is significant. This article…

Method is usually viewed as completely separate from philosophy or theory, focusing instead on techniques and procedures of interviewing, focus groups, observation, or statistical analysis. Several texts on methodology published recently have added significant sections on philosophy, such as Creswell's (1998) Qualitative inquiry and research…

This article is an attempt to provide a partial corrective to more traditional analyses of higher education policy that most often obscure broader social factors that contribute to unequal power relations and educational outcomes related to social class, gender, and race/ethnicity. This article focuses specifically on gender issues and employs a…

In this essay, the author considers the goals and uses of ethnography and qualitative inquiry in higher educational research as they are limited by commitments to verifying data and representing the "real" and argue for broader understandings of the practice and uses of such research. In particular, the author is concerned that the field's…

This article describes an alternative methodology for conducting research that is intended to bring about institutional change. This process involves developing deeper awareness among faculty members, administrators, or counselors, of a problem that exists in their local context. In some instances these individuals may be unaware that the problem…

Interviewing is key to many forms of qualitative educational research; we interview respondents for oral histories, life histories, ethnographies, and case studies (see Tierney & Dilley, 2002, for an overview of interviewing in education). Despite the primacy of verbal data in qualitative research, basic introductions to qualitative research…