“Success” in the borderlands: Measuring success for underrepresented and misrepresented college students.

Abstract

Current measures of student success fall short in capturing the nuanced and multiplicitous ways that underrepresented and misrepresented students (e.g., Latinx, first-generation college students) who are navigating the intersection of multiple contexts important to their identities (e.g., home communities and university), define and understand success. For students, success includes individual and collective desires for well-being, or the desire to acquire an education to improve one's life and to pursue social justice in their home communities. In this study, we used Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of the Borderlands (1999) as a conceptual framework to develop a Borderlands scale as a new measure of student success. For the psychometric validation of the scale, we surveyed 250 college students who were enrolled in a Hispanic Serving Research Institution. On a random half sample of the data, we performed an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine a good fitting model. On the other half of the sample, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess evidence of validity. For the purposes of assessing convergent and discriminant validity, we provide correlations between the Borderlands scale and three thriving quotient subscales: academic determination, social connection, and diverse citizenship (Schreiner, 2010a), as well as high school grade point average (GPA) and composite Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. We end the article with implications for the college student success literature, and for universities, especially Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Paradoxes, uncertainty, and resistance: A psychology of meaning‐making at the margins

“…Indeed, to capture the dynamic nature of meaning-making, as something responsive to the multiple and shifting social worlds that students inhabit, researchers should leverage multidisciplinary tools (for more discussion, see Azmitia et al, 2023;Fine & Sirin, 2007). We need methodologies that embrace contradictions, encourage reflexivity, and incorporate diverse methods, including dialectical critique (McNiff, 2013), critical race, intersectional, and decolonial approaches to quantitative methods (Adams & Stocks, 2008;Comas-Díaz et al, 2024;Covarrubias & Vélez, 2013;Covarrubias et al, 2018;Fattoracci et al, 2021;Langhout et al, 2022;Salter & Adams, 2013); master narrative methodology (Josselson & Hammack, 2021;Syed & McLean, 2021); participatory action research (Nguyen et al, 2024); and testimonios (Bernal, 2001;Burciaga et al, 2024;Fernández & Gamero, 2018;Silva et al, 2022).…”