Dissertation Proposal Defense by Paige Haber

Location

Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Room 211

Free

You are cordially invited to attend a dissertation proposal defense titled "Perceptions of Leadership: An Analysis of College Students' Definitional Understandings" by Paige Haber.

Cheryl Getz, EdD, chair; Steven A. Gelb, PhD, member; Noriyuki Inoue, PhD, member; Susan Komives, EdD, member

Open to faculty and current graduate students only

ABSTRACT

Colleges and universities increasingly have embraced the goal of developing students’ leadership capacity.  A variety of curricular and co-curricular leadership programs currently exist and continue to be developed to address leadership development outcomes. There is, however, limited understanding of how college students think about and define leadership. This study attempts to fill this gap in the research by examining the ways in which college students define leadership.  Additionally, the study will respond to a call in higher education research to consider students’ demographic differences in the forefront of research design rather than as a subsequent independent variable by examining the leadership definitions of White women, women of color, White men, and men of color. This study will also attempt to identify additional demographic and environmental variables that are associated with students’ different definitions. 

This mixed methods study will analyze data from the large-scale Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) project, a national research study on college student leadership and the college experience.   Data for the MSL were collected through an online survey of over 300,000 undergraduate college students at 101 U.S. colleges and universities.  For the proposed study 1600 participants will be selected through random criterion sampling to form four groups: 400 White women, 400 women of color, 400 White men, and 400 men of color. 

The participants completed an online survey that included a variety of demographic and environmental variables and an open-ended response prompt that asked participants to provide their definition of leadership.   The responses will be examined first qualitatively and then quantitatively.  The qualitative analysis will entail using traditional content analysis procedures to identify different categories of leadership definitions.  The different definitions will then serve as the dependent variables in logistic regression analyses to identify demographic and environmental variables associated with the definitions.