Measuring Academic Resilience in Quantitative Research: Exploring Researchers’ Methodological Decisions

Abstract

Academic resilience refers to academic success, or competence, despite adversity that would typically increase the risk of underachievement. The aim of this research field is to identify promotive and protective factors and processes that facilitate resilience, with the ultimate goal of developing the capacity for resilience in more students. However, achieving these objectives is limited by the current variation in the way that academic resilience is defined, conceptualised, and measured in quantitative research. With no agreed upon gold standard measure of the construct, researchers must make a series of methodological decisions that are influenced by a range of contextual factors. These decisions, in turn, impact on research findings and knowledge production. Accordingly, the aim of this thesis was to explore the methodological decisions that researchers make when measuring academic resilience, drawing on the critical quantitative research paradigm to do so. Firstly, a systematic review was conducted to document the different ways that academic resilience is measured in quantitative research. Situated within the Aotearoa New Zealand context, the three subsequent studies investigated the components of risk and academic competence to provide a comprehensive body of work that can be drawn upon by researchers to develop measures of academic resilience that are valid in their own study contexts. Given the social justice orientation of quantitative criticalism, this thesis used the investigation of researchers’ methodological decisions as a vehicle through which to evaluate the utility of the academic resilience construct in promoting equity in education. The findings suggest that how researchers conceptualise academic resilience, measure risk and academic competence, and then combine these components to measure the construct impact on research findings (e.g., what protective factors predict academic resilience) and knowledge production (e.g., where the locus of change is for the development of academic resilience). At a broader level, this thesis highlights the active role that the researcher plays in shaping the research process and, thus, underscores the importance of researcher reflexivity and criticality in quantitative research. Engaging in these practices will help to ensure that the political nature of social science constructs, like academic resilience, and the research process itself, are addressed in ways that contribute to meaningful and sustainable social change.