Introduction: Questions of Research and Methodology

Abstract

Over the past three decades, researchers' approaches to studying higher education and the questions they explore have changed markedly. In the 1960s and 1970s, the field was dominated by quantitative approaches (Keller, 1998), particularly small-scale statistical studies that sought to document such phenomena as access, mobility, faculty productivity, and student retention. In the last decade, as modes of inquiry have expanded in educational research generally, higher educational researchers have also turned to qualitative research, whose increasing legitimacy is reflected in the publication of the ASHE Reader on Qualitative Research in the early 1990s. In addition, critical, constructivist, and even postmodern approaches to inquiry have gained some credibility and turned researchers' attention to questions of the purposes of research. While methodologies and paradigms have expanded, so have ideas about who conducts research and for whom. For example, foundations are now funding research collaboratives of practitioners and researchers rather than individual researchers, making partnerships and action research more prevalent. A fundamental assumption we make is that this proliferation of research approaches offers valuable forms of knowledge and insight to those concerned with the study and practice of higher education.