Award Date
5-1-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education
First Committee Member
Stefani Relles
Second Committee Member
Blanca Rincon
Third Committee Member
Doris Watson
Fourth Committee Member
Starr Hoffman
Number of Pages
187
Abstract
This dissertation project addressed the gulf between the persistence rates of students in underrepresented minority (URM) and non-URM communities. To this end, a multisite exploratory qualitative case study focused on the experiences of students in academic libraries was conducted. The project applied a sense of belonging as an interpretive framework based on prior research which relates belonging to improved academic success outcomes among URM students. Previously, libraries’ capacity to support URM students’ sense of belonging had not been systematically analyzed. The three articles that constitute this dissertation, a literature review and one article on each of the two sites, a university pseudonymously referred to as Southwestern University (SWU) and a community college referred to as Southwestern Community College (SWCC), described the interplay of institutional context and student characteristics in the dynamics of URM students’ belonging. They each support the overarching finding that academic libraries are a retention resource by fostering URM students’ sense of belonging.
Keywords
Academic Libraries; Belonging; Equity; Retention
Disciplines
Community College Education Administration | Community College Leadership | Education | Library and Information Science
File Format
File Size
2000 KB
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Chodock, Ted, "This is My Place: The Academic Library as a Retention Resource" (2024). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 4972.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/4972
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Included in
Community College Education Administration Commons, Community College Leadership Commons, Library and Information Science Commons