Inside doctoral education in America: Voices of Latinas/os in pursuit of the PhD

Journal of College Student Development, Jul/Aug 2002 by Gonzalez, Kenneth P, Marin, Patricia

Data Collection

To capture the individual interpretations of our doctoral experiences, we relied on autoethnography as a research methodology (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). We selected the use of autoethnography because of its ability to connect personal experiences with cultural contexts. Ellis and Bochner defined autoethnography as an "autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural" (p. 739). Autoethnographies are usually written in first-- person voice, and are represented in such forms as short stories, poetry, personal essays, journals, and social science prose (Ellis & Bochner). As a means of obtaining autoethnographies, each of us wrote about events or insights that occurred throughout our doctoral programs and that marked our experience. We viewed the collection of our autoethnographies as Phase 1 of data collec- tion. These accounts represented interpretations of our individual experiences.

To obtain a collective interpretation of our doctoral experiences, we used a version of dialogical research methods (Padilla, 1993) rooted in the ideas of Paulo Freire (1970). This research approach has two notable strengths: one concerning the researcher, and the other concerning the participants. For the researcher, dialogical research methods provide an opportunity to assess common and divergent views of the participants' experiences. For the participants, this approach allows them the opportunity to not simply describe their experiences but to make sense of them and consider alternative social arrangements that could improve their lives. Dialogical research in the tradition of Paulo Freire relies on group discussion as the primary method for revealing overt and hidden aspects of problematic experiences in everyday life. It is a problem-posing method of inquiry. Consequently, through dialogue, participants are able to expand their focus from their own individual problems and struggles to the macro-sociopolitical environments in which they find themselves. The result of this method is what Freire called "critical consciousness" - a process by which individuals learn to perceive the social, political, and economic barriers in everyday life that lead toward action against these oppressive elements.

To accomplish this dialogical research approach (Padilla, 1993), all of us participated in a focus-group dialogue. Instead of constraining the dialogue with a set of preselected questions, we began the session by reading portions of our narratives to each other. This process proved to be effective in grounding the discussion in our doctoral student experiences (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In the sharing of each autoethnographic account, the narratives were transformed into "stimulus objects" (Padilla, 1993) or tools to initiate a dialogue about our experiences as Latina/o doctoral students. After each of us had read her or his narrative, we began a problem-posing, reflective dialogue about our experiences as doctoral students. With each verbal exchange, we constructed a collective and critical understanding of our experiences. The dialogue component of the research design occurred in the Spring of 1998 and lasted approximately 3.5 hours. The dialogue was audiotaped and transcribed. We viewed the collection of the dialogue data as Phase 2 of our data collection. This data represented our collective and critical interpretation of our experiences. Although we view both sets of data - the autoethnographies and the dialogue - as central in constructing a holistic picture of our doctoral student experiences, the findings presented here were based primarily on our focus-group dialogue.