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Analysis of social media forums to elicit narratives of graduate engineering student attrition
Author(s) -
Berdanier Catherine G. P.,
Whitehair Carey,
Kirn Adam,
Satterfield Derrick
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/jee.20299
Subject(s) - attrition , graduate students , narrative , engineering education , perception , psychology , social media , axial coding , coding (social sciences) , medical education , pedagogy , qualitative research , grounded theory , engineering , computer science , sociology , world wide web , engineering management , medicine , linguistics , philosophy , social science , dentistry , neuroscience , theoretical sampling
Abstract Background Graduate engineering student attrition is prevalent, but most literature that studies graduate attrition is accomplished in disciplines outside of STEM or engineering, yielding an incomplete understanding of either attrition or persistence. Purpose/Hypothesis The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationships between motivators of attrition for engineering graduate students. Design/Method Data were collected using an online Web‐scraping “bot” that mines data from the online forum Reddit. The anonymous textual forum threads collected were qualitatively analyzed through open‐coding methods. Results The emergent themes reveal the interconnectedness between the roles of the advisor, student perception of cost, their support network, goals, their perceptions of how others perceive them, and quality of life and work. Our model is flexible in that it illuminates underlying combinations of factors that can influence student attrition. Conclusion This study provides a framework by which various stakeholders can approach the support and education of graduate students, including mentoring students both toward or away from graduate school per the student's goals.