COVID‐19 and pre‐tenure counseling faculty: A collaborative autoethnographic investigation

Abstract

Higher education faculty worldwide experienced heightened stressors due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, from completing their professional roles and responsibilities virtually to balancing personal and professional stressors. Consequently, the pandemic created many adjustments for pre‐tenure counseling faculty across research, teaching, and service. In response to this pandemic, we explored the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the personal and professional lives of four pre‐tenure counseling faculty members. Accordingly, we used collaborative autoethnography to investigate our experiences and narratives as pre‐tenure counseling faculty, which resulted in seven overarching themes. We discussed the implications for practice, advocacy, education, and faculty training.

A-Methodological Saturation: A Grounded Theory Analysis

“…For instance, the participants noted that they struggled to advocate for rigorous qualitative research and saturation and were given feedback from department chairs and promotion and tenure committees stating that “qualitative research takes too much time,” “qualitative research doesn’t count as much as quantitative [research],” and “qualitative research is not as rigorous as quantitative research.” The participants were also instructed to “not to hold up a student’s dissertation” or “just let them conduct ten interviews and be done with it.” Similar difficulties and experiences were identified within the publishing and grant-writing process, such as receiving statements like “this is a great idea, but you should have thought about how to make this quantitative” or feedback that was not grounded in qualitative methodology. As a result, there is a need for advocacy and disruption from all counseling and psychology stakeholders (Killian et al, 2023), especially those in positions of power (e.g., department chairs, journal editors, and members of grant committees; Peters et al, 2022), to address the concerning and inequitable structures and systems that disincentivize, discredit, and limit the value, trustworthiness, and rigor of qualitative research, saturation, and trustworthiness.…”