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Dissertation Information for Elizabeth Lane Lawley

NAME:
- Elizabeth Lane Lawley

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- University of Alabama (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- J. Gordon Coleman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Marion Paris
- Joan L. Atkinson
- Leslie Edward Mullins
- Ronald Wayne Rogers

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Making sense of doctoral student attrition in library and information science

Abstract: The recruitment and retention of doctoral students is an immediate and ongoing problem in graduate education, with attrition rates for doctoral students over the past 40 years estimated to be 50% or higher. The problem of attrition is particularly acute for departments of library and information science (LIS); the discipline faces increasing pressure from within the academy, with the result that many LIS schools and departments have closed or merged with other units within their institutions. Any attempt to improve recruitment and retention--and by doing so to strengthen the position of the LIS program in the research university context--requires a far better understanding of the current LIS doctoral education experience than is currently available. This study uses Dervin's sense-making methodology to elicit and evaluate information about the attrition experiences of individual doctoral students; the results provide a starting point for understanding the factors unique to the LIS doctoral student attrition experience.

In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted via electronic mail with seven doctoral students who left their LIS doctoral programs after 1990. While the results of this preliminary study cannot and should not be used to generalize about LIS doctoral programs, or about the larger population of LIS doctoral students, they do allow preliminary identification of factors that appear consistently--across students and schools--to influence students' views of their doctoral programs, and their decisions to leave those programs. The key factors identified in this study as contributing to the attrition decision included low commitment to program, lack of perceived career instrumentality, limited integration into the academic community, completion of master's degree before entering doctoral study, frustration with lack of clarity in policies and procedures, poor relationship with academic advisor, and mistrust of the departmental and institutional administrations. The results of the research also validated the choice of the sense-making methodology as a means of examining the attrition decision, as well as the effectiveness of the use of electronic mail in the sense-making interview process.

MPACT Scores for Elizabeth Lane Lawley

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:13:38

Advisors and Advisees Graph