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Our transformative mixed-methods project, funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, responds to calls for more cross-institutional qualitative and longitudinal studies of minorities in engineering education. Our project builds on prior work that demonstrated the impacts of gender and race on academic trajectories in Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering (EE, CpE, and ME, respectively) to answer the following questions: 1. Why do Black men and women choose and persist in, or leave, EE, CpE, and ME? 2. What are the academic trajectories of Black men and women in EE, CpE, and ME? 3. In what ways do these pathways vary by gender or institution? 4. What institutional policies and practices promote greater retention of Black engineering students? In Year 4 of our project, the research team has engaged in deeper analysis of our quantitative data from the Multi-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) database and our qualitative data from 79 in-depth interviews of students in the three study majors at our four study institutions. Expanding on findings presented in prior years, in this paper, we describe emergent results from three papers from Year 4 of our project: • Paper # 1: “Who Tells Your Story? Qualitative Methods for Establishing Connections and Eliciting Narratives” was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methodology in 2021. It includes a description of the development of the card-sorting activity that students completed to describe their reasons for choosing to major in engineering and an exploration of different ways to analyze the data. Analysis of how frequently the factors influencing the major choice were chosen by interviewees has allowed us to identify those factors that carry the greatest importance for students and how they vary for persisters and switchers. • Paper # 2: “GPA Trends of Black Mechanical Engineering Students”: Our early qualitative work has led to questions about students who switch majors and those who leave the university. We are using the MIDFIELD database to better understand characteristics of students who switch majors and who leave the university. We will use functional cluster analysis to group the GPA trends to find clearly defined groups of students' GPA. Preliminary findings suggest that the students who switch majors have different GPA trends than the students who leave their institutions. This holds true for whether the student chooses to switch their major and stay within engineering and students who choose to leave engineering. • Paper # 3: “Pride and Prestige: Factors Influencing How and Why Black Students Choose to Attend a Predominantly White Institution or a Historically Black University”: In this paper, we explore the reasons that students in our study majors decided to attend either a HBCU or a PWI. Our early analysis revealed that students had diverse reasons for college choice, including affordability, location, familiarity with the institution, family encouragement and connections, and prestige of the university. Our paper will also describe the differences between students who attended a HBCU or PWI in their rationale for deciding to attend a particular university.
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Who Tells Your Story? A Card-Sort Activity for Eliciting Authentic Narratives
Card sorting has been used in qualitative studies in various fields to better understand how individuals organize information and make choices based on it. As part of a mixed-methods study of why Black engineering students initially chose their major and why they subsequently decided to persist in or switch out of it, we developed a card-sort activity and used it in 79 semi-structured student interviews. Besides generating data relevant to the mission of our study, the activity shifted the students' focus to their own experiences and away from the interviewers, who were not matched with them on race or age and with whom there was a power differential (interviewers with doctorates talking with undergraduates). The article contains a brief overview of the broader study, a description of steps taken to promote authentic storytelling by the interviewees, an outline of the development and application of the card-sort activity, representative findings, and recommendations for other researchers contemplating using a similar technique. We believe our experience in using the card-sort technique and our subsequent mixed-method analysis of the resulting data will benefit qualitative researchers seeking authentic stories.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734347
- PAR ID:
- 10546595
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Qualitative Methods
- Volume:
- 20
- ISSN:
- 1609-4069
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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