{"id":1213,"date":"2016-11-15T15:18:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T20:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=1213"},"modified":"2016-11-28T17:03:39","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T22:03:39","slug":"the-problem-of-access-in-researching-elites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2016\/11\/15\/the-problem-of-access-in-researching-elites\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Access in Researching Elites"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

When we started the research process at the beginning of the semester, Adam warned us that gaining and maintaining access is consistently a major obstacle in the research of elites and elite institutions. Since these schools are often extremely selective, they attempt to limit, or at least control, the information that is released about them.\u00a0They are especially wary of published critiques, like the project we’re working on. Though we all accepted this advice, our class, especially my research group, had to learn about the barriers to access firsthand.<\/p>\n

We saw how the\u00a0Croft School \u00a0was working to control our perceptions of their school from the beginning of our research. Even though Adam and his research assistants asked for four subjects for student interviews who represented the average student, the dean they were communicating with chose four prefects to be interviewed. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, prefects are upperclassmen who are chosen\u00a0(usually by the administration) to serve as leaders and role models for the school. They are generally the most involved and highest achieving students in the junior and senior classes. Think: Percy in Harry Potter.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This choice reminded me a lot of my own experience at an elite school. The students who were chosen as admissions tour guides or as speakers at open houses and other events were always the girls who were almost over-involved in campus life. One of my friends, a constant selection for school promotion, was also the student government president, newspaper editor, and a two-sport athlete our senior year.<\/p>\n

While the search for average interview subjects delayed our process a little, access became an even bigger issue when we actually\u00a0attempted to contact the student that our research group was assigned to interview. We were incredibly excited to start the interview process, so we reached out to our student immediately after receiving his contact information. We were confident that our student would respond to the friendly and enthusiastic email we drafted together.<\/p>\n

However, with each passing day, our excitement turned into a mix of anxiety and frustration. We received no response from our subject as our classmates finished all three of their interviews. We sent follow-up emails checking in and religiously checked not only our inbox but our spam and trash folders as well. After almost two weeks, we got a short email back from our student. He apologized for being non-responsive, but said he had too much schoolwork at the moment and would get back to us as soon as he was available for research. We first reached out on October 27th, so we are now approaching three weeks without interviews.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While I can understand why the school wanted to provide us with overachieving students for our interviews, I can’t easily identify why our student has been so hard to coordinate with. Is his schoolwork so heavy or so stressful that he really is just too busy? Does he not consider this to be a priority of his? Does he feel awkward or concerned with\u00a0talking about himself and his school with strangers? Even though we haven’t been able to collect anecdotal data on Croft School from our student, I think considering all of these possibilities still helps us\u00a0generate questions and inferences about\u00a0the student experience at this institution.<\/p>\n\n

\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we started the research process at the beginning of the semester, Adam warned us that gaining and maintaining access is consistently a major obstacle in the research of elites and elite institutions. Since these schools are often extremely selective, they attempt to limit, or at least control, the information that is released about them.\u00a0They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6678,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1347,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions\/1347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}