Main: Undergraduate Student Experiences at Hunter College

LIMITATIONS
The problem of respondent self-selection may compromise the overall validity of this research project.Originally, when potential focus group participants were screened for this project, it was found that a disproportionate number were students who either identified themselves as being in the top half of their class or were students who seemed to hold extremely negative views of Hunter’s administration and were seeking to vent their frustrations in a focus group setting.Clearly, both groups do not truly reflect Hunter College’s student body and therefore the findings presented in this report are not generalizable to the entire student population at Hunter College.

Researcher bias in coding and analysis may threaten the validity of the study. An attempt was made to reduce the problem of researcher subjectivity in two ways.First, the researchers collaborated on the development of the coding scheme.Second, to improve the overall reliability of the coding process, a triangulation check was conducted to ensure that the three researchers were coding the transcripts in a similar fashion.