The Communities of Character Studies
The ECI Research and Scholarship Team is currently working on a mixed-methods research project, called the Communities of Character Studies, conducted in collaboration with Heart + Mind Strategies. The overarching aim of this project is to examine how higher educational institutions seek to promote student’s character development and, more generally, how communities within and beyond higher education contribute to, or perhaps detract from, character development. The project includes two phases: an initial, qualitative study, involving interviews with students, staff, and faculty, and a second, quantitative study involving a longitudinal survey of college students and young adults who are not enrolled in higher education.
The Three Main Objectives
Objective 1
Assess how character education is approached and pursued in higher education institutions, including the strategies, practices, and educational experiences they use to foster character development.
Objective 2
Assess how communities within and beyond higher education contribute or detract from character development, including other factors like worldview and influence of other communities.
Objective 3
Investigate how audiences define “good character” and the different frames for looking at “good character.”
A Mixed Methods Study
The overarching aim of this research project is to investigate young adults’ character development and how communities and educators influence such development. It begins with an in-depth, qualitative study, followed by a larger-scale quantitative study.
The qualitative study will clarify how young adults, as well as faculty and staff in higher education, think about what it means to have good character. It will also explore whether and how educators seek to influence students’ character development and the characteristics of the communities that most shape young adults’ development.
The quantitative study will be informed by and designed around the results of the qualitative study. It will examine how young adults change over time, and how the changes they experience may differ depending on whether they are enrolled in higher education and whether they are involved in particular kinds of communities. A special strength of the quantitative study is the inclusion of a non-student sample. Much higher education research relies on samples composed entirely of students, which obviously limits inferences about higher education itself influences students.
For questions about this study, please contact Michael Prinzing at .