Who is shaping the field? Doctoral education, knowledge creation and postsecondary education research in the United States

ABSTRACT

Previous research has found the field of higher education, particularly in the United States, is dominated by functionalist approaches, a preponderance of survey data, and the ubiquitous use of advanced quantitative methods to investigate educational phenomena. This descriptive study aims to illuminate why the field is constructed in this way. Given that researchers have found doctoral education to influence the way scholars think about, conduct and disseminate their research, we explore the educational histories of published authors in the field with the belief that examining the distribution of institutional affiliations among authors may shed light on the dominance of particular approaches to knowledge production within the field. Specifically, we examined doctoral institutional affiliations of authors published in three top-tier higher education journals in the United States from 2006 to 2010. Our analysis illuminates that knowledge produced in the field of higher education is highly concentrated among both authors and particular institutions. Our findings raise important questions about the social processes governing knowledge generation within the field – including questions about the extent to which such concentration is or is not desirable.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• knowledge creation
• research methodologies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use ‘doctoral studies' as a general term that refers to all terminal degree education. The overwhelming majority of authors in this study received a doctorate degree, although there were some MFA degrees and Medical degrees. These were coded ‘not education-related'.

2. These results are not additive because some articles had authors from both institutions.