Application of Person‐Centered Approaches to Critical Quantitative Research: Exploring Inequities in College Financing Strategies

Abstract

Critical quantitative researchers aim to uncover the existence of systematic inequities in educational processes and outcomes through analysis of quantitative data (Stage, 2007). Critical quantitative research also involves questioning the models, measures, and methods typically used in conventional quantitative approaches and employing those better capable of describing the experiences of historically understudied and marginalized groups (Stage, 2007). This chapter discusses the utility of person-centered approaches to doing critical quantitative research that address questions related to educational equity.Person-centered approaches are concerned with identifying groups of individuals that are qualitatively different from one another but share similar attributes, experiences, or outcomes with those individuals in the same category. These approaches, which are underutilized in the higher education research literature, are particularly useful for revealing educational inequities that might otherwise go unnoticed using more common variablecentered approaches.In this chapter, I describe person-centered approaches and contrast them with more common variable-centered approaches. I then discuss the ways in which person-centered approaches can be used in critical quantitative work to explore questions related to equity for historically NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, no. 163

Career–life balance for women of color: Experiences in science and engineering academia.

“…Laura’s quest for career–life balance was centered on elder care for her mother and Laura’s need for financial security. Her narrative shows how certain academic norms, such as expected hours on side projects, timelines to graduation and assumptions about students’ economic status, disadvantage students who enter their programs with familial and financial needs, as is more commonly the case with underrepresented minority students relative to White students (Malcom-Piqueux, 2013).…”

Unpacking the intertemporal impact of self-regulation in a blended mathematics environment

“…In this learning setting, the student population is heterogeneous in terms of prior knowledge and prior education, and this heterogeneity is expected to impact learning behaviours (e.g., a need to actively engage in Sowiso because of a lack of Mathematics prior knowledge). Therefore, conditions for variable-centred approaches to modelling are not likely to satisfy (Howard & Hoffman, 2018) and two-step approaches starting with person-centred methods (Fincham et al, 2018;Malcom-Piqueux, 2015;Masyn, 2013) seem more appropriate in our context, with the aim to identify characteristics profiles of learning.…”

“…Theories that are formulated as the existence of certain relationships between variables. Beyond the testing of these hypothesised relationships, also the case of predicting outcomes or studying how antecedents influence their consequences, require variable-centred modelling approaches and statistical dependence techniques that correspond to these approaches (Howard & Hoffman, 2018;Laursen & Hoff, 2006;Malcom-Piqueux, 2015;Marsh , Lüdtke , Trautwein, & Morin, 2009;Masyn, 2013;Morin, Bujacz, & Gagné, 2018).…”

“…In contrast, person-centred modelling approaches (Howard & Hoffman, 2018;Malcom-Piqueux, 2015;Masyn, 2013;Morin et al, 2018) have the goal to group individuals, such that people within each category are similar to each other and different from individuals in other categories. A major reason to apply person-centred modelling lies in characteristics of the data, in particular when using large data sets from contexts with "diverse" heterogenous students.…”

Activists, Non-activists, and Allies: Civic Engagement and Student Types at MSIs

“…This study presents an exploratory study of MSI student participation in civic engagement activities using the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) 1 , a large-scale, multi-year, quantitative dataset which includes 24 MSIs. To focus on the experiences of students at MSIs, we adopted a person-centered rather than a variable-centered approach (Malcom-Piqueux, 2015). We grouped students based on their level of engagement in a variety of civic-minded behaviors to create three distinct types of students at MSIs: Activists, Non-Activists, and Allies.…”