In this study, Michelle M. Espino uncovers the ways in which twenty-five Mexican American women PhDs made meaning of conflicting messages about the purpose of higher education as they navigated within and through educational structures and shifting familial expectations. Participants received "consejos", or nurturing advice, from parents…

"Research assistant" is a term used to describe student researchers across a variety of contexts and encompasses a wide array of duties, rewards, and costs. As critical qualitative scholars situated in a discipline that rarely offers funded research assistantships to graduate students, we explore how we have engaged in faculty-student…

Guided by an integrated framework of resilience, this in-depth qualitative study examined the major stressors persons of multiethnic Mexican American heritage encountered in their social environments related to their mixed identity and the resilience enhancing processes they employed to cope with these stressors. Life-story event narratives were…

With increasing numbers of first-generation college students enrolling in colleges and universities across the US, so too is the need to begin preparing such underrepresented students for graduate school and a career in academia. As a phenomenological case study of student transformation, this dissertation examines the experience of nine…

With a goal to better understand what it means to become a United States citizen, the present qualitative study uncovered the narratives of 11 Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in Phoenix, Arizona, and included the investigator as a research participant. Grounded theory analysis of the combined auto-ethnographic and interview data yielded…