Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Dissertation: Practitioner check

I had lunch today with a professor who is a board member herself at an institution very similar to the ones I used in my case studies - a small, co-educational liberal arts college in the Southeast. She isn't in higher education research (although she is familiar with some of it) but was interested in my findings as a trustee.

Most of what I found was validated by her own experience. Most the things that weren't were idiosyncratic to the institutions I studied - for example, I did not expect that the college that required trustee attendance at a lot of campus events was typical.

It was a nice validity check to compare my results against someone who has an academic understanding of the field and practitioner experience.

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