I've been considering a lot of different topics but I think I'm zeroing in on a paper related to social anxiety and its effects on college students, such as social isolation, struggles with academics, dropping out, and other ways in which students with social issues can slip through the cracks (which I think happens a lot at colleges, especially at large universities such as Rutgers). I had never heard of the term "attrition" before and that's an interesting and relevant concept I want to explore.
As I continue with my research I hope to narrow my topic a bit so I can analyze more deeply without going off on too many tangents. Many of the articles I found regarding social anxiety actually discussed links between social deficits and alcohol use, and I'm interested in possibly discussing that in my paper. I think there is a lot to explore there. I used Google Scholar to search for articles related to social anxiety during college, and while there were plenty specifically related to social anxiety and drinking, there weren't many on social anxiety/social isolation in college students in general at first glance. I definitely need to do a little more digging, but some of the older blogs have some interesting sources (not sure if I can actually cite those in my paper since they were used by other students, but they are good for general knowledge regardless)
This writing (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Fresco/publication/7791819_Social_anxiety_alcohol_expectancies_and_self-efficacy_as_predictors_of_heavy_drinking_in_college_students/links/09e41506283ffbbe8c000000.pdf) discusses the connections between social anxiety and drinking, and it goes into different reasons why college students drink. It mentions many different studies and I think this will be valuable when I read it more in-depth.
Professor Goeller mentioned Vincent Tinto's "Leaving College" as a good book about how social isolation can lead to academic issues and eventually dropping out of college (again reminds me of Alana from Paying For the Party). I'm definitely going to read this. Including this in my searches led to some interesting studies. This one (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED365253.pdf) examines specific cases of students who dropped out of college, and suggests that pre-enrollment qualities in students who drop out have more of an effect than Tinto writes about. I'm interested in reading Tinto's book and then the different writings it spawned.
This article also seems promising:
http://clt.curtin.edu.au/events/conferences/tlf/tlf2001/darlaston-jones.html
Yes, there is definitely research on social anxiety and alcohol use. That would be an interesting angle.
ReplyDeleteBut the overall focus on preventing "student attrition" (a term that enrollment managers use) or "dropping out" is really good, because that answers the "so what?" question. "Yes, some students have more social anxiety than others, but why should colleges do anything about it?" One word answer: Attrition! Obviously student attrition is costly to everyone -- to schools who lose a paying customer, to students who are often left with student debt but no degree (the worst possible outcome of going to college), and to society which is left with fewer college grads.
ReplyDeleteWe talked in class about how a term like "social anxiety" definitely is different from "social isolation" in the way it implies a personal or internal cause for withdrawal from social engagement -- whereas "social isolation" is the term used by sociologists Armstrong and Hamilton, who see a major cause of that withdrawal from social engagement as socially caused -- by social closure or shunning or the Vampire Effect. So these are very different terms. An interesting book that can help you think about the psychological vs. the social origins of withdrawal might be One Nation under Stress by Dana Becker, which talks about how we have similarly privatized stress by imagining it as an internal thing that all of us have to learn to overcome rather than the result of social factors (such as student debt or inequality etc.)