Obscuring Voices in Analytic Choices

• In Event: Disrupting Hegemonic Quantitative Practice

Abstract

Quantitative research in higher education has tended to focus on the individual, rather than the organization, as the unit of analysis. To illustrate, Perna and Thomas’s (2008) comprehensive synthesis of several years of research about college access across the disciplines of economics, sociology, psychology, and education revealed that just three studies out of 175 employed the organization as the unit of analysis, and two studies focused on the state as the unit of analysis, with the remaining 170 focused at the student level. Although this review is nearly a decade old, more recent literature suggests that there is much opportunity for growth for higher education research to address organizations as units of analysis (e.g., Bastedo, 2012), including addressing the role of diverse institutional types, particularly less selective institutions and Minority-Serving Institutions, in promoting educational opportunity (Deil-Amen, 2015; Stevens, 2015). When applied with equity-oriented questions in mind, advanced quantitative techniques such as Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Structural Equation Modeling can provide methods to examine structural and institutional influences, such as the racial/ethnic or socioeconomic composition of a campus, on equitable conditions and outcomes in higher education (e.g., Park, Denson, & Bowman, 2013).

Focusing on students as the sole or primary units of analysis obscures the role of structural and organizational factors that privilege some groups and marginalize others, thus limiting the potential for quantitative research to transform research, policy, and praxis to advance postsecondary equity (e.g., Martinez-Aleman, Bensimon, & Pusser, 2015). Accordingly, this presentation will encourage audience members to cultivate “equity-mindedness” (Dowd & Bensimon, 2014) in quantitative research. Equity-mindedness involves generating questions that refine how categories and units of analysis are defined in higher education research, focusing on the role of institutions, rather than individuals, in constraining or enhancing postsecondary opportunities for diverse students (Bensimon, 2007).

To consider the possibilities for operationalizing institutional and organizational power dynamics that affect postsecondary opportunities, this presentation will also offer a multi-level framework of intersectionality that addresses asymmetrical power relations in higher education (Nuñez, 2014). This framework provides a lens that quantitative researchers can employ both to recognize the variation of identities within social groups and to identify structural and organizational units of analysis for quantitative inquiry, with an eye toward expanding equitable postsecondary opportunities for historically underserved demographic groups. It addresses the importance of taking into account multiple social identities in shaping college access and success, including race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and religion, in approaches such as subgroup analyses and interaction effects. It also emphasizes how situated social contexts that include educational policies, discourses around social opportunities, faculty-student interactions, and shifting historical conditions coordinate across meso- and macro-levels to structure postsecondary opportunities in ecologies of higher education (e.g., Perna, 2006; Perna & Thomas, 2008; Renn & Arnold, 2003). From this perspective, critical approaches can be applied in quantitative research (e.g., Stage & Wells, 2014), and “making the context[s] explicit” (Stage & Manning, 2016, p. 204) strengthens the potential for quantitative work to transcend traditional hegemonic tendencies.

Author

• Anne-Marie Nunez, The Ohio State University