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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: November 3, 2003
Latest Update: November 3, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Alumni Study Lecture Notes

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Notes for recording your information from the Alumni Study:

Since the opportunity to undertake this study came along in only the last six weeks of our statistics course, we need to start by askind some important questions:

1. Is the study worth undertaking on such short notice? What if we cannot complete a survey and analysis within the time remaining? Also we will have to give up some time from our traditional curriculum to learn different skills we'll need for this project.

   We considered that a real study is more engaging than text book problems, and so that is in its favor. We also considered that many surveys and studies end up in someone's file drawers, unanalyzed, untouched. A waste of energy and effort. But we considered that one of the major advantages of this study is contacting students and alumni, and reflecting to them that CSUDH cares about them, whether they are giving funds are not. Even if we don't finish the study, that result makes it worth going as far as we can. We thne considered that we would have less time to concentrate on some statistical tests with SPSS, but we figure that learning how to do some of them in depth for this study will make it lots easier to pick up the others later.

2. What precisely do we want to do?

   We consdiered that creating good will with students and alumni is one of our goals along the way to other goals. And what the university wants is creative efforts to locate alumni. Lots of us are almost ready to graduate, and we would like to participate in building a database of alumni. Because we know lots of people who weren't sociology majors, we decided to keep two databases. One for sociology majors, whom we will hunt diligently; and one for Others, whom we'll save for future efforts. But so that no one feels excluded, we'd like to keep the Others network active, too. We wouldn't want to be left out just because we were the wrong major.

3. Is this a social problem or a sociological problem we're working on?

   We considered that the link between graduates and their university is a real social problem that we want to try to make better. Therefore, this is a study in practice rather than sociological theory. Of course, there's lots of sociological theory to back up our assumption that increasing and formalizing the links between students and the university and between students with each other will strengthen the students' achievement in school. Sometimes those links make the difference between dropping out and staying in school. At the alumni level, they make the difference between staying in touch and continuing with lifetime learning or drifting away and feeling excluded from the reality of university life. Perhaps some of us should consider writing an interpretation of the study to add to the literature on strengthening imterpersonal links.

   I forgot the fourth paragraph, and no one e-mailed me their notes yet. jeanne