Racial-ethnic group membership, color-blind racial attitudes (i.e., unawareness of racial privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racial issues), and social dominance orientation were used to predict perceptions of campus climate in general and specifically for people of color among a sample of 144 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students at a predominately White university. Results indicate that after controlling for racial-ethnic minority status, perceptions of "general campus climate" (GCC) and "racial-ethnic campus climate" (RECC) are predicted by color-blind racial attitudes. Post hoc analyses indicated that unawareness of racial privilege partially mediated the relationship between race and RECC and fully mediated the relationship between race and GCC. Individuals with higher levels of color-blind racial attitudes tend to perceive the campus climate more positively. Implications for research, training and practice are discussed.
The term campus climate has become commonplace within higher education. However, there is little consensus on how best to define and measure it. Our study is a qualitative content analysis of 118 campus climate studies. Guided by the conceptual understanding of campus climate put forth by Peterson and Spencer (1990), we explore the nature of campus climate research based upon studies found in a clearinghouse database of faculty campus climate studies. We found that those conducting studies are most often institutional employees. There was no standardization of design or instrumentation in these studies. Studies did not rely on a single definition of campus climate or on any set of best practices for assessing campus climate. Additionally, studies explored various aspects and constituents of the campus-both in and out of the classroom, and for the working environment for faculty and students and occasionally staff and administrators. Implications and specific recommendations for conducting campus climate research based upon extant literature and on findings from the study are included.
We examine the American landscape of higher education quantitative research concerning how gender and sex demographic information is collected. We use a directed content analysis to examine the prevalence and
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