| Susan Dumais
Harvard University
The causes of working class educational success
FINAL REPORT:
Much of the sociological research on working class students' educational success has been quantitative and variable-based, lacking in detailed description of students' lives. However, the existing qualitative studies of educational success tend to have a limited scope, making it difficult to generalize their results. I address these limitations in the research by arguing for a person-centered research strategy that uses large-scale survey data to produce results that are both generalizable and that retain the nuances of individual students' lives. I explain and illustrate the first step in the strategy: developing detailed narratives of the lives of a subsample of students, using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Drawing comparisons between those working class students who attend a four-year college and those who end their education with a high school diploma, I emphasize that there are multiple pathways that can lead to the same educational outcome.
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