1. How do students who have “bounced back” from poor academic performance to become high achievers describe this transformation?

1. How do students describe the role of their pre­college experiences, abilities, aspirations and values in this transformation?
2. How do students describe the role of their faculty, department, advisers and other university staff in this transformation?
3. How do students describe the role of their college friends and peer group in this transformation?
4. How do students describe the role of their parents in this transformation?
5. How do students describe the role of non­college reference groups, including peers, employers and outside organizations, in this transformation?
6. How do students describe the change in their goals, aspirations and values after this transformation?

By framing the questions around participants’ descriptions and perceptions, I believe that this research is well-suited for a qualitative study.  While I could have built a quantitative study around this issue of “bouncing back,” I was really interested in exploring the how and why students bounce back in a more in-depth way.  I wanted to get their narratives, descriptions, and perceptions of this transformation, and I felt I would get a richer, more complete picture through semi-structured interviews (rather than a survey with fixed multiple-choice questions).  For example, I don’t just want to know if parents play an important role in this transformation, I want to know how.  Furthermore, I like how qualitative research allows for the data collection and analysis to continue simultaneously.

While there have been no qualitative studies of academic buoyancy, there have been many on academic resilience.  One of the leading researchers on this topic is Erik Morales.  In his study of high achieving Dominican American students (2000), for example, Morales chose a phenomenological approach guided by the theoretical perspectives of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism.  Participants included five high achieving Dominican American students attending NYU.  The study paid particular attention to the protective factors that played a role in the development of a “resilience cycle” for the students.  The author conveyed qualitative validity mainly through a rich description of the site, the participants, and the themes they conveyed.  He included an in-depth discussion of two of the participants, including excerpts from their interviews, to provide an illustration of how the resilience cycle manifests itself.  According to Morales, these excerpts also provide the reader with “a taste of the students’ voices” (p. 12).

I thought that Morales was justified in his use and presentation of a phenomenological approach.  To begin with, he makes an excellent case for the need to explore the academic resiliency of low-SES minority students, Dominican American students in particular.  According to Morales, in 2000, minority students’ academic resilience had received “far less attention than have their failures” (p. 7).   Using phenomenology, he was able to develop a five-step “resilience cycle” which takes into consideration the relationship between risk factors and protective factors, and which highlights the importance of student’s awareness of these factors.  The model that he developed on the “resilience cycle” would not have been created without a phenomenological approach that emphasized students’ perceptions of this particular phenomenon.

This article was very useful to my research topic as I am proposing to study a similar construct (academic buoyancy) using phenomenology.  Academic buoyancy is a relatively new topic that has only been researched quantitatively, outside of the U.S.  It seems “ripe” for an initial, deeper exploration that a phenomenological study would provide.  Also, I appreciated how (within the constraints of a small, qualitative study) Morales was able to develop a useful model for understanding resilience as a cycle.  If I were to proceed with my study, I would want it to generate a practical, useable model or theory that would further our understanding of academic buoyancy.

Reference

Morales, E. E. (2000). A Contextual Understanding of the Process of Educational Resilience: High Achieving Dominican American Students and the “Resilience Cycle”. Innovative Higher Education, 25(1), 7-22.