Through my readings and interview with Joe Kulapan, I decided I wanted to do something on the topic of transfer students, especially from community colleges. I would like to see how community colleges help and/or hurt student's chances at bachelor degrees. To do this, I would need data that follows individual students from school to school. Several of the articles I have read have used the National Education Longitudinal Study: 1998-2000, which would work because it tracked students across all their schools, and could give a full picture of student's lives. I hoped that I would be able to use it, so I borrowed the data from the library. It seems, however, that either the data is only cross-sectional and does not give individual results, or I am unable to extract this individual data due to technological incompetence. Either way, it has been disheartening not being able to use that data, and I am not sure where I can find good data on this subject.
So I see my options as trying to find other data, to approach this subject from a more theoretical perspective, or to switch to some other sub-topic in graduation. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
What data do you have? I'd like to see it and then respond to your questions. Do you have an Excel file with the data? If so, can you post it to Google Drive and then share it with me?
ReplyDeleteThe data is on a program called Electronic Codebook for Windows. It shows a lot of the questions they asked, but I have found no way to export the data behind those questions to a program that I could analyze them with. I can see a text file of the data, but then it just gives data summaries, not individual answers. I have tried to look up what to do online, but have had no luck.
ReplyDeleteYou may have to go to a different source and the change the questions you will ask. Here is a possibility.
ReplyDeleteI found this article, which seems close to what you were asking about before. The source of this is here. Data seems to be downloadable from that site.
I would consider this a likely candidate for what you will use.
Thanks for the data source. I think I'll spend the next week or two combining this data with NCHEMS data and see if I can extract something interesting.
ReplyDelete