Main: Undergraduate Student Experiences at Hunter College

METHODOLOGY
In the spring of 2002, the Acting Director of the TLC and graduate student researchers enrolled in Hunter College’s Graduate Social Research Program designed the focus group discussion guide, interview schedule, and consent forms to comply with CUNY's Institutional Review Board standards.Both the focus group discussion guide and the interview schedule were pre-tested on one undergraduate student and graduate student researchers.

In designing the focus group discussion guide, special care was taken to elicit respondents’ feelings about their academic, social, and administrative experiences at Hunter.Likewise, the interview schedule was constructed to ascertain what coping strategies students employ as well as to understand their feelings about their experiences at Hunter.

The four focus groups took place on May 30, 2002. For the focus groups, students were recruited through flyers and classroom announcements to participate in a one-night focus group.As an

incentive, students were offered $25 and a dinner for their participation.Students who expressed an interest in participating called the TLC voice mail and were subsequently contacted by a researcher and screened.Students, who were enrolled in classes in Spring 2002 and had completed at least 12 credits at Hunter, but no more than 130, were accepted to participate.In addition, students were excluded if they had participated in a focus group in the last six months.

Students were asked about their GPA and whether or not they considered themselves to be on the top or bottom half of their class at Hunter.Students were divided into four groups based roughly on their perceived academic achievement and number of credits completed. Fifty students were recruited, but only 26 students showed up to participate in the focus groups.

Students were assigned to focus groups based in part on their level of self-reported academic achievement.The groups were organized as follows:

Table A

The purpose of grouping the students was to create a comfortable environment for the students by highlighting their similarities to each other.However, due to student schedules there were students in some groups who did not match the academic profile of the rest of the group.

Four graduate student researchers were assigned to moderate one focus group each.For the focus groups, two confidentiality forms and two consent forms were distributed to each participant,

requiring his/her signature along with the signature of the focus group moderator.The participants were instructed to keep one confidentiality form and one consent form for their records and return the other copies to the researcher.After the groups ended, participants were asked to provide some demographic information: age, GPA, race/ethnicity and parents’ highest education degree.

Students were recruited from the pool of 26 focus group participants to be interviewed individually.Students were selected who appeared to have “more of a story to tell” regarding their experiences and their personal coping strategies in navigating the Hunter College system than was revealed in the focus group discussion.The students were offered an additional $25 to be interviewed.Two graduate student researchers conducted the three interviews at various dates in early June 2002.

Both the focus groups and the interviews were tape-recorded.The audio-tapes from these sessions were transcribed and pseudonyms were used in the place of real names to protect the confidentiality of the student participants.The consent forms, confidentiality forms, the one-page demographic questionnaires, and the audio-tapes which contain the real names of the participants were also secured in a locked cabinet in the TLC office.

Employing the common tactics of qualitative analysis, three graduate student researchers collaborated and created a coding scheme to note patterns and themes, make contrasts and comparisons, and form conceptual/theoretical coherence within the seven transcripts (i.e. transcripts for four focus group discussions and three one-on-one interviews).The researchers then analyzed the seven transcripts for patterns and relationships, refining the most frequent recurring themes to the four analytic units listed below:

1.Description of Student Participants

2.Experiences of Hunter’s Academic Environment

3.Experiences of Hunter’s Social Environment

4.Experiences of Hunter’s Administrative Environment

In order 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.For example, researchers Rachel Schwartz and Sharon McCann-Doyle both coded the same student interview transcript, and researchers Sharon McCann Doyle and Jeneve Brooks-Klinger both coded the same focus group transcript.In a comparison of these transcripts, it was found that Schwartz and McCann-Doyle coded in the same way 54% of the time.Similarly, it was found that McCann-Doyle and Brooks-Klinger both coded the same 61% of the time.Therefore, the reliability of this coding process, although subject to some inter-coder variance, demonstrated an overall consistency in the application of the codes assigned by the graduate student researchers.