The importance of concern for others in the lives of emerging adults has been underestimated by emerging adult theory. In this set of studies, I explore emerging adults’ concern for others in the higher education context. I use three different samples, a group of 10 Latino emerging adults working to address inequalities in access to higher education for undocumented students, a large national sample of college students, and a sample of 37 college students from a selective midwestern university. Together these three studies point to the need for emerging adulthood theory to address the concern for others in the context of higher education. In Chapter 1, I introduce the studies. In Chapter 2, I use 10 case studies of a group of Latino emerging adults working to improve access to higher education for undocumented students and examine the role of concern for others in emerging adulthood. Results provide support for the importance of including concern for others in emerging adulthood theory as well as highlight how a focus on the constraints created by higher education contexts can help the theory address the critique that it fails to describe the lives of minority emerging adults. In Chapter 3, I use a national sample of college students to examine how exposure to ethnic diversity experiences in four-year colleges is associated with concern for others in the career domain, specifically a desire to work for social change. I use a partial proportional odds model—a novel approach for this literature—to examine how diversity experiences in college may be associated with different levels of interest in expressing concern for others in the career domain. Consistent with past research, this study found that taking an ethnic studies course and participating in an ethnic student organization was associated with white self-identifying seniors’ prioritization of working for social change in their career plans, but not underrepresented minority students. In Chapter 4, I expand on the findings of Chapter 3 by exploring emerging adults’ definitions of social change using a sample of students from a selective midwestern university. I use a mixed-methods approach using grounded coding of semi-structured interviews and Fisher’s exact tests. I find that social change definitions are primarily about positive impacts on society, supporting a contention that emerging adults can express their concern for others in the career domain. However, variation in students’ definitions suggested that the term social change should be defined in surveys to understand the kind of impact students hope to have through their careers. In Chapter 5, I discuss the implications of the three studies to future work using large surveys for understanding student interest in social change and emerging adulthood theory.

Creator

• Zapata, Claudia Elena

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-v4rw-g941

Subject

• Higher education

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_714206
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14969

Keyword

• Emerging Adults
• Social Change
• Higher Education

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright