Combining Ethnosurvey Data with Set-Theoretic Methods: An Application to Gender and Debt

• In Event: 363 - Regular Session. Methods, Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative

Abstract

This study examines the gendered sources of adolescents’ prospective orientations towards student loan debt. It shows that, within a senior class of California high school students, extreme loan aversion assumes gendered forms and springs from gendered roots. Drawing on linked data from original ethnosurvey data (a survey linked to interviews) in conjunction with a novel analytic technique – QCA combined with case studies - the analysis maps four near-sufficient pathways to loan-aversion on the part of both female and male students: two anticipatory pathways, a parental background pathway, and a pathway rooted in past borrowing experiences. The contours of these four distinctive pathways to loan aversion are analyzed using typical cases identified through QCA techniques and detailed with the aid of in-depth interviews. Whereas the anticipatory pathways involve either male or female students, the parental background pathway and the borrowing experience pathway are both specific to a single gender. By disclosing the inner workings of these pathways, the article illuminates the complex ways in which debt aversion among adolescents emerges from gender-differentiated expectations, experiences, and identities.

Authors

• Jeremy Markham Schulz, University of California, Berkeley

• Laura Robinson, Santa Clara University