Roles y responsabilidades

In this research study I utilized three broad types of research methods that can be categorized as: primary, secondary and analytic/interpretive. Primary methods are those

methods that serve as the point of entry to the field. These methods center on the experiences of low-income mothers through direct engagement with them as research participants. Primary methods used in this research included: in-depth interviews and research journals. Two focus groups were also conducted with a total of 8 participants. Through the combination of these methods I engaged with a total of 58 unique participants3 who were both low-income student parents4 and who were current or recent college students.

Secondary methods primarily involved collecting institutional data and conducting policy research. As part of these methods I contacted numerous coordinators, directors and providers working in programs that directly worked with student parents as at least one of the targeted populations they served and collected materials on their programs and/or interviewed them directly about their work to provide institutional supports for low-income student families.5 In addition to these institutional interviews I have collected official documents, recruitment materials, reviewed the websites of various programs, and reviewed the formal written policies governing these institutions. Attendance at various professional conferences, including the Student Parent Support Symposium, and the College and University Work & Family Association

3

30 participants completed interviews; 20 completed research journals and 8 participated in focus groups.

4

All participants were biological mothers with the exception of one focus group participant who was a student- father. In addition, one participant was both a biological mother and a step-mother.

5

For example, an on-campus child care center may serve other university or community families, but also may offer priority enrollment to student families, provide tuition discounts, or otherwise specifically accommodate for and work with student-parents.

Conference, helped me to gather information about student parent programs across the country, learn more about such programs in-depth, collect research and written materials from multiple organizations and make connections for further research and to build advocacy coalitions.

Additionally, I have engaged in ongoing training and policy briefing events on issues pertaining to student-parents, higher education, student financial aid, public assistance,

entitlement programs, the recession, and the federal budget crisis. Furthermore, I have researched many of the policies directly from the legal and institutional documents that pertain to programs serving low-income student-parents, which has further expanded my analysis.

Originally I proposed to use interpretive focus groups in my process of analysis and interpretation. While two interpretive focus groups were conducted as part of the process of data analysis, due to issues that arose in the process of coordinating and conducting the focus groups, which I will discuss below, I have also used some of the data from these focus groups in my primary data analysis. While these focus groups were planned and structured as interpretive focus groups, as they took place they provided both primary data and aided the analytical process. However, because I was unable to gather extensive demographic data on the focus group participants they are not included in my demographic data below. In addition I have engaged in a participatory writing process whereby a small group of current or former low- income student mothers reviewed drafts of each findings chapter giving me feedback and

offering me their input on the themes highlighted in the data, presentation, and things I missed in my analysis.

Primary Research Methods

Interviews were conducted with low-income mothers who are currently enrolled in college or who have completed or left college within the past year (N=31). These interviews were loosely structured and sought to understand mothers’ individual life contexts, how they were faring in school, the barriers and difficulties they have faced, as well as what resources they have drawn upon for support. I also asked participants for their ideas for what supports or

programs they would suggest or wish for in order to better assist them in their educational pursuits.

Interviews were conducted in a variety of settings on-campus, in a participants’

community and in some cases in their homes. This primarily involved traveling for face-to-face interviews and included research visits to Seattle, WA; Columbus, OH; Boston, MA; Portland, Salem & Eugene, OR6; and New York City. Additionally, seven interviews were conducted via telephone and audio recorded with a telephone recording device; an eighth long-distance interview was conducted via Skype.

While all interviews were audio recorded, two and a half interview recordings were lost due to equipment failure.7 In one of these cases I was able to write immediate and extensive summary notes based on the interview within one hour after it ended. Another interview recording was partially usable and I was successfully able to transcribe half of the interview before the interview lost transcribable quality. Unfortunately, the one remaining damaged recording was lost, despite efforts to work with a professional transcriptionist using data recovery software to restore it.

6

Ironically, the research visit conducted in Oregon was part of the pilot research in the early stages of field work when I was still living in Boston; the research visit conducted in Boston occurred after I was living in Oregon.

7

Specifically, two telephone interview recordings were lost due to faulty telephone recording equipment; the third interview, half way through, for a still unknown reason, the recording warped suddenly at which point it became impossible to audibly understand and thus to transcribe.

My strategies for interviewing drew from a feminist methodological approach (Devault and Gross 2007, Anderson, Armitage, et al. 2004). My interview and journal protocols were developed through an inductive process through which I refined and revised my protocol based on emergent topics within my findings that I sought to explore in further depth. This began with a pilot study in Spring 2009 involving eight participants attending colleges or universities in Oregon. Seven of these participants completed in-depth interviews while an eighth participant completed both a research journal and an in-depth interview at the end of the term in which she completed the research journal. This interview involved both standard interview questions as well as specific discussion about the survey instrument, the journal process, and other issues related to research participation. This pilot research also included a failed attempt at a preliminary focus group at the University of Oregon (all but one participant who RSVP’d no showed for the focus group and thus the event was converted into an in-depth interview). Participants who missed the focus group were offered the opportunity to complete a telephone interview instead.

My interviews used a semi-structured format in which I came to the interview with a list of ten questions that I used as a checklist style guide rather than a strict interview structure. Interview questions were augmented with impromptu questions in a conversational dialogue- based style. This style of interviewing both has the capacity to address a researcher’s original questions, as well as allowing her to generate new questions and learn new things she may not have conceptualized a priori (Corbin and Morse 2003). The natural flow of conversation is valued within a feminist methodology for several strengths. First, by allowing the conversation to flow more naturally, rapport is more easily established (Devault and Gross 2007). When rapport is established people are more open and more likely to share their story. Also, by

allowing the participant to guide the pace and flow of the interview, while using a more loosely structured interview protocol, a researcher can simultaneously discuss her pre-established

questions, as well as inductively learn from her participants thus allowing her to expand her own perspective (Anderson and Jack 1991). This allows for increased validity in that a researcher is more likely to have her preliminary assumptions challenged by her participants, and thus facilitates unanticipated or unexpected findings.

Research Journals

Interviews provide a method through which a researcher can hear the story of women’s lives through their own perspectives. Interviews also offer an important general picture of the story of one’s experience as they remember it and as they understand it, which provides a useful mechanism of gathering the stories of women’s experiences. Yet, while in-depth interviews provide for a richness of data on women’s lived experiences, this data is limited in that it is based on recollection. The process of recollection involves the processes of the human memory. By nature the human memory filters through large quantities of information, and records the highlights of one’s experiences rather than the entirety of events. Thus, the small but not inconsequential elements of one’s experience cannot be revealed through in-depth interviews based on recollection. While use of probing techniques within an interview may be able to uncover some of the informal or small-scale supports and hardships, gathering this information through recollection is challenging because these factors are, by nature, small, informal and easy to forget, de-prioritize, or overlook.

Research journals8 provided a useful additional method for collecting data on the smaller, less formalized or more taken for granted sources of support or hardship that could make or

8

This method is sometimes described in the literature as a “Daily Diary”, although in many uses of the method responses are neither submitted nor completed on a daily basis.

break a mothers’ ability to successfully progress through her academic program. This real-time approach to data collection provided the ability to follow a student-mother over a period of time and better document the hardships or difficulties she experienced as well as the sources from which she drew support. While such events may not be occurring at the particular moment in time that an interview is scheduled, a journal kept over a period of time can document these various small crisis and supports, how they were managed, and how they impacted a

participant’s life: financially, educationally and otherwise.

A research journal, or research diary, is different from a personal journal or diary in several ways. A research journal is by nature a more public document than a personal journal as it is made with the anticipation that someone will read it and eventually publically present the findings gleaned from it (albeit with the promise of confidentiality). Research journals also differ from personal journals in that they focus on a specific topic not generally of the participant’s choosing. Unlike a personal journal that provides an open page to record one’s thoughts, often times research journals include a series of open-ended questions, close-ended questions or both. The defining feature of a research journal is that it is collected over regular intervals over a specified period of time (Hyers, Swim and Mallett 2006).

I created and hosted an online research journal system through which 20 participants completed research journals for one academic semester or quarter between Spring 2009 and Fall 2011.9 In total, 16 participants completed their journals during the Fall term, and 5 completed their journals during the Winter or Spring Term. 10 One participant from Fall term 2009 continued her participation through Spring term 2010. While I actively tried to recruit

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Participation by term was as follows: Spring 2009 (pilot) =1; Fall 2009 = 11 Spring 2010=2 Winter Quarter/Spring Semester 2011=2; Fall 2011=5.

10

Because a majority of participants attended colleges used the semester system, it made sense to lump participants from Winter quarter into the Spring term group.

participants during Spring term in order to have an even sample, response rates were simply much lower during this time. I hypothesize that this is due to shifts in a student’s perception of their time and ability to obligate themselves to further commitment. While in the Fall a student often starts with a certain level of freshness and vigor after the summer, by their second term they are more likely to be exhausted and over-extended. This hypothesis was supported by an experience whereby students responded with interest in Fall 2009. Because I already had met my maximum number of participants for the term I offered to invite them to participate in the Spring and they agreed to be contacted. However, when contacted in December, only one of these women decided to proceed with participation in the study, the other student-mothers citing other obligations, stress and overwhelm as their reasons for changing their minds about participating.

Participants were asked to keep weekly reflections on their day-to-day experiences, documenting their present needs and the supports they used to meet these needs including both formal (e.g. social service programs, financial aid, non-profit aid) and informal (e.g. lenient instructors, kinship and friendship networks, family support) assistance. The research journal protocol was structured via an online survey system (Survey Monkey) in which participants were asked both open-ended questions which provided large text boxes for respondents to reply open endedly (e.g. Do you have anything to celebrate this week? What are some of the issues you are dealing with this week?). In addition participants were asked targeted close-ended questions about a variety of events or issues that they may have experienced or dealt with in the past week that they might not recall offhand without probing (e.g. How many times this week: Did your childcare fall through? Were you late to class? Did your car break down? Etc.). Most of these questions used a ordinal scale for the frequency of these events between 1 and 4 or more

was any issue they could not find resources in that particular week as well as the consequences of not having resources to meet their needs.

In addition to the protocol used for weekly journal entries, all participants were asked to complete both an entrance survey and an exit survey. The entrance survey was primarily used for demographic data collection purposes. The exit survey provided overall both open and close- ended questions asking participants to retrospectively reflect on the research term. It also

collected outcome variables such as term and overall grade point averages, grades earned for the research term, and percentage of courses completed. Finally, as part of my ongoing inductive process, the exit survey allowed me to pose new questions that had emerged through the journal process that had not been part of the research instruments at the beginning of the process but were added to the exit survey based on participant input and emergent findings.

Respondents logged in and completed the same research journal protocol each week using a unique self-selected user name. While I originally asked participants to select a pseudonym that they wished to be called in the study, as it was an online survey many

participants chose handles instead of pseudonyms. In many of these cases I selected names in a way I felt was true to the intention and meaning behind a participants’ choice of handle. Many participants added numbers to their handles which I simply removed, so, for example, Infinite8 simply became Infinite. Other participants chose non-first name pseudonyms that were not consistent with the uniform presentation of my data, for example “Superwoman” and “Mrs. Weasley”. In these cases I took license to use the first names of these fictional characters, so Superwoman became Kristin (Superwoman’s first name) and Mrs. Weasley became Molly (Mrs. Weasley’s first name).

One of the most common difficulties with the research journal process is that it requires a continual commitment from participants to log in each week and to complete their journal entry for an extended duration of time (12-16 weeks depending whether the participant attended a college or university that used the quarter or the semester system). Recognizing that low-income mothers who are in college have busy lives and may not easily be able to commit to an ongoing weekly commitment, I was careful to communicate this expectation to each potential research journal participant, and in the case where a participant decided that they could not commit to journal participation, I offered them the opportunity to be interviewed (except whereby I had already met a quota for a certain region, see recruitment methods section for more details). In addition I offered journal participants a participation stipend on a per diem basis of $10 per completed survey (including weekly surveys and preliminary demographic “entrance” surveys) and $20 for completion of the exit survey. Despite my explanation of the longer term

commitment, I believe that the potential to earn a total $150-$190 cash stipend was appealing to many participants and I often met journal participation quotas before meeting my state maximum for interview participants. However, some participants, when offered the details on journal participation did opt to do an interview instead of a research journal.

Regardless of my retention efforts however, given the complex lifeworlds of my

participants, attrition and early termination of research participation was to be expected. Thus, I developed two standards to measure participant attrition. First, in order to be included as a journal participant in my research findings one must have completed a minimum of an entrance survey and one weekly research journal entry. For those participants who completed the entrance survey and never completed a research journal entry, their data was discarded. Furthermore, six participants completed less than 50% of their weekly research journals. According to Hyers,

Swim and Mallet, while any researcher prefers the optimal situation whereby a participant completes every journal promptly and consistently, this situation is impossibly idealistic when working with a large body of participants. Thus, research journals should be used adaptively and with flexibility that allows for use of the data that you do have, rather than discarding data simply because it is imperfect. Given the substantial investment of time, money and energy involved in collecting research journal data, this made complete sense in terms of my research.

Also, given that various issues arising in the process of research data collection could either create barriers to participation (such as getting your internet shut off, or a disastrous winter storm) or take precedence over research participation (sick children, lack of food, or an eviction notice), for those participants who were able to stay in contact, even while missing journal entries, these experiences became invaluable insights.

Even whereby a participant decided that they could not continue participating in the weekly journal process, I made an effort to keep in contact with them, offer support where I could, and offer them the opportunity to re-start their journals or keep offline records of their weekly experiences for later submission. By staying in contact with these participants many were able to reconnect and re-start the journal process once their individual crisis subsidized. In one example, a Midwestern winter storm knocked out power to a participant and her family for several weeks. She did, however, keep offline logs of her experiences during that time, and submitted them to me at a later date when she was back online. I also asked participants who either formally or informally ended participation early, when possible, if they would be willing to complete an exit survey, even when they had decided that they could not continue weekly journals.

As part of the research process I made an effort to send weekly reminder e-mails and to