Implicit resilience theories: a qualitative study of context-shapers at higher education institutions

ABSTRACT

High dropout rates in STEM disciplines are certainly among the most crucial challenges that higher education is facing. While prior research has mainly applied an individual-centered approach that has helped identify factors explaining student dropout, an important yet under-examined issue is how those responsible for shaping the academic environment of students vary in their implicit assumptions of why some students persist while others drop out. In this study, we shift the focus toward the narratives regarding the reasons for student drop out. We report on an in-depth qualitative interview study comprising 59 deans of studies, administrators (i.e. quality managers and student advisors), and student representatives. This group of individuals contributes to the challenge of reducing student dropout by shaping the teaching and learning environment of students at German higher education institutions. Our grounded-theory model indicates that these context-shapers attend to different implicit theories on what constitutes resilient versus non-resilient students. The implicit resilience theories, in turn, result in dropout being legitimized in different ways, which determines the judgements made by context-shapers in terms of actions suitable to reduce student dropout.

KEYWORDS:

• Implicit theories
• resilience
• higher education
• work role responsibilities
• context-shapers

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Yvette Hofmann and Nestor Burgmann for their valuable help in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (01PX16010A).