Voices from the pipeline: high school completion among rural Latinos

Journal of Cultural Diversity, Summer, 2003 by Mary D. Lagerwey, Elizabeth Phillips, Kathi Fuller

Purpose of the Study

To meet the needs of particular communities, interventions and advocacy must be population-specific and based on each community's understanding of its problems and their causes (Anderson & McFarland, 1996; Drew, 1996; Gadow & Schroeder, 1996). The researchers' assessment of community-specific supports and challenges to high school completion thus began with explanations given by representatives of populations at risk (Armbruster, Brady & Thompson, 1999; Krothe, Flynn, Ray & Goodwin, 2000). Statistics regarding Latino under-representation in health professions and lack of educational achievement give overall pictures of trends, disparities, and risks but do not capture the experiences and self-representations of the subjects of such studies.

This paper presents an analysis of supports and challenges to high school completion as articulated by Latino adolescents in rural Southwest Michigan. The insights gained by assessing their particular explanations are being used to initiate community-level interventions that support minorities preparing for health professions.

RESEARCH APPROACH, DESIGN, AND PROCEDURES

Theoretical Perspective for Analysis

A framework of narrative inquiry guided methodological choices for data collection and analysis. Narrative inquiry suggests that researchers pay attention to individual stories, in particular those of the less powerful. Such an approach challenges stereotypes and replaces them with stories that celebrate the value of individual lived experiences and insights. Group interviews were chosen as a means of data collection that simultaneously captures individual stories and the contexts within which these stories are lived.

Narrative inquiry guides the researcher in identifying stories imbedded in the interview texts and how interviewees select, arrange, and order in attempts to make sense of their experiences. This framework allowed the researchers to gain insights into the participants' interpretation of supports and challenges to high school completion, their "explanations of how things came about" (Perlin, 1992, pp. 4-5). Narrative inquiry draws attention to ways in which individuals and groups understand and attribute causality and meaning to events and forces in their lives (Langer, 1991; McCabe, 1991). High school completion is thus an intermediary outcome, necessary for progress toward eligibility for health professions. Researchers were also guided by an interpretive narrative approach to perceived truths (Atkinson, 1997) which means that the stories interviewees told of success and frustrations in high school were understood as their ways of finding meaning in their lives and cannot be taken as direct unmediated reflections of causality.

Narrative inquiry can also provide a basis for appropriate and culturally sensitive interventions (Koch, 1998; Sandelowski, 1991, 1994; Van Manen, 1997; Parker, 1990; Vezeau, 1992). It has been used to guide nursing interventions in a variety of clinical situations, including fetal anomaly (Sandelowski & Jones, 1996), cystic fibrosis (Feldstein, Baker & Gemma, 1996), prenatal genetic counseling (Anderson, 1998), and patient suffering (Gunby, 1996).