New Scholarship in Critical Quantitative Research, Part 1: Studying Institutions and People in Context

Seven years ago, New Directions for Institutional Research published the volume Using Quantitative Data To Answer Critical Questions. In that volume, a group of quantitative researchers sought to differentiate their approaches to quantitative research from more traditional positivistic and postpositivistic approaches. The term quantitative criticalists described researchers who used quantitative methods to represent educational processes and outcomes to reveal inequities and to identify perpetuation of systematic inequities. The term also included researchers who questioned models, measures, and political processes, in order to ensure equity when describing educational experiences. These scholars resisted traditional quantitative research motivations that sought solely to confirm theory and explain processes. This volume provides an expanded conceptualization of those tasks and adds a third: to conduct culturally relevant research by studying institutions and people in context. The chapters in this volume present work focused on underrepresented persons in a variety of levels of higher education. Each scholar has used critical quantitative approaches to examine access and/or success in the higher education arena. Their scholarship pushes the boundaries of what we know by questioning mainstream notions of higher education through the examination of policies, the reframing of theories and measures, and the reexamination of traditional questions for nontraditional populations. The work is divergent, but the commonality of the presentations lies in each scholar's critical approach to conventional quantitative scholarship. Their research highlights inequities and explores factors not typically included in conventional quantitative analysis.