Past, Present, and Future of Critical Quantitative Research in Higher Education

Subjective Well-Being, Critical Race Theory, and the Assessment of Measurement Invariance Across Racial Groups

“…For these reasons, Mertens (2015) challenged researchers to find novel approaches to investigate and address the complex issues faced by society that are rooted in difference and inequity. Wells and Stage (2015) echoed this sentiment while calling attention to the reality that even the term critical is not applied uniformly across the existing literature. With that in mind, a major question that comes out of this study is: Should investigative efforts be geared toward the pursuit of more accurate measures of SWB to adequately demonstrate the negative impact of biased social institutions as described in CRT, or would it be more prudent to address issues of inequity so that perceptions of SWB are more comparable across groups?…”

Broadening the Study of Participation in the Life Sciences: How Critical Theoretical and Mixed-Methodological Approaches Can Enhance Efforts to Broaden Participation

“…In fields and disciplines such as higher education, sociology, and gender studies, in which many scholars engage in critically transformative research, policy, and practice, there is an emergent interest in work that includes critical quantitative analysis, regardless of whether the study is entirely quantitative or it pairs qualitative and quantitative work in a critical mixed-methodological approach ( Baez, 2007 ; Browne, 2007 ; Carter and Hurtado, 2007 ; Faircloth et al ., 2015 ; Wells and Stage, 2015 ). Quantitative research and the large-scale and big data that often accompany it are frequently used to make policy and programmatic decisions.…”

Disrupting the Big Lie: Higher Education and Whitelash in a Post/Colorblind Era

“…Therefore, institutional ethnographic approaches can be one way to bridge the individual, organizational, and sociopolitical to understand the functions of whiteness at this present moment and to also call into attention the effects encountered by People of Color. Finally, as quantitative scholars continue to wrestle with the potential of grounding their work in a critical epistemology (Wells and Stage, 2015), there is an opportunity to consider how researchers can mobilize CWS and the propositions named above in quantitative studies. Although these are but three examples, they serve as potential ways through which scholars can take up our call to engage different methodologies and methods to pinpoint how whiteness is operating within colleges and universities.…”