Who is shaping the field? Doctoral education, knowledge creation and postsecondary education research in the United States

Previous research has found the field of higher education, particularly in the United States, is dominated by functionalist approaches, a preponderance of survey data, and the ubiquitous use of advanced quantitative methods to investigate educational phenomena. This descriptive study aims to illumin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Higher education research and development 2016-09, Vol.35 (5), p.1039-1052
Main Authors: Saunders, Daniel B., Kolek, Ethan A., Williams, Elizabeth A., Wells, Ryan S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Doctoral Degrees
Doctoral education
Doctoral Programs
Doctoral research
Educational research
Educational researchers
Graduate Students
Higher Education
Knowledge creation
Knowledge level
Postsecondary Education
research methodologies
Research Methodology
Research projects
Research utilisation
Statistical Analysis
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Summary:Previous research has found the field of higher education, particularly in the United States, is dominated by functionalist approaches, a preponderance of survey data, and the ubiquitous use of advanced quantitative methods to investigate educational phenomena. This descriptive study aims to illuminate why the field is constructed in this way. Given that researchers have found doctoral education to influence the way scholars think about, conduct and disseminate their research, we explore the educational histories of published authors in the field with the belief that examining the distribution of institutional affiliations among authors may shed light on the dominance of particular approaches to knowledge production within the field. Specifically, we examined doctoral institutional affiliations of authors published in three top-tier higher education journals in the United States from 2006 to 2010. Our analysis illuminates that knowledge produced in the field of higher education is highly concentrated among both authors and particular institutions. Our findings raise important questions about the social processes governing knowledge generation within the field - including questions about the extent to which such concentration is or is not desirable.
ISSN:0729-4360
1469-8366
DOI:10.1080/07294360.2016.1139552