This article describes an alternative method for the study of first-year students’ impressions of their first-semester experiences in higher education. Using an innovative, phenomenologically-oriented, individual-environment interaction technique, a sample of undergraduates from a public four-year comprehensive university were asked to take a series of reflexive photographs, representative of their impressions of the university, describe in writing the reasons why the photographs illustrated their experiences, and discuss the various underlying themes of their photographs in subsequent focus-group interviews. This reflexive photography technique breaks the study subjects away from the typical researcher-oriented quantitative technique and allows for a more open and creative analysis of student perceptions. Our research revealed a number of primary themes including perceptions about the university’s physical environment, interactions with faculty, interactions with other students, student support services, and career counseling and preparation for the future with a level of detail and university specificity not available through quantitative techniques alone.

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PurposeThe purpose of this manuscript is to quantify exactly how much information and/or predictive content is contained in business sentiment surveys.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses techniques drawn from information theory econometrics, and more specifically the theory of information entropy, to characterize the predictive content of business sentiment surveys. The authors apply these techniques to publicly available information obtained from various editions of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Empire State Manufacturing Survey, one of the most popular business sentiment surveys conducted in the USA. Parametric and non‐parametric statistical analyses are used to examine differences in the quantity of predictive content across various questions in the survey.FindingsThe results suggest that business sentiment surveys contain a reasonably high degree of informative content. However, the amount of informative content varies considerably from question to question in the survey. Questions that are more general in nature and ask about current perceptions (as opposed to future expectations) contain more informative content.Originality/valueBusiness sentiment surveys are a practical, low‐cost method to assess the current and expected future state of local and regional economies. However, the value of these surveys is questionable if they do not contain much information. This research finds that such surveys do contain a large amount of information, and are worth administering. However, specific types of survey items convey more information that others, which also suggests that business sentiments surveys can be further revised to maximize the amount of content gained from respondents.

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