Anthropology

Katherine A. Mason and Collaborators Awarded National Science Foundation Grant to Address the Impact of COVID-19 on First-Gen College Students

A new grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) will allow Mason and Co-Principal Investigators Andrea Flores (Brown University) and Sarah Willen (UCONN) to follow a cohort of first-generation college students and their parents over a period of two years using the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) platform to collect monthly journal entries.

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the educations of first-generation college students — those whose parents did not complete a college degree. First-gen college students and their parents are more likely than other students to be low-income, minoritized, and/or of an immigrant background. They often have fewer resources to absorb the impact of the educational and social crises stemming from the pandemic, but also may have more at stake in completing a college degree. 

In May 2020, Katherine A. Mason (Brown University) and Sarah Willen (University of Connecticut) launched an online journaling platform called the Pandemic Journaling Project. Since its inception in May 2020, nearly 1,800 people in over 50 countries have contributed more than 23,000 journal entries and accompanying survey data to the platform. The NSF-funded project innovates new ways of conducting ethnographic research in the Covid era, by expanding upon the successes of the Pandemic Journaling Project to follow students and their families longitudinally.

With the help of the NSF grant, Mason and Willen, along with a third Co-Principal Investigator Andrea Flores (Brown University), will conduct research examining how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the educational, familial, and life goals of first-generation students and their parents and the actions taken in support of these goals. The findings of this project, to be shared in public-facing and web-based formats including a public archive, can inform university supports and social services for vulnerable students and families. 

The project hypothesizes that students and their families during the pandemic may be prioritizing caretaking actions aimed at immediate practical and emotional needs over the longer- term goals associated with higher education. This hypothesis will be investigated with three years of data collection and analysis. Sixty parent-student dyads will participate in: 1) two years of monthly journaling on the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) platform; 2) two one-on-one interviews with the research term; and 3) two dyadic interviews between parent and student. The narratives that researchers collect will capture how parent-student dyads’ thinking, goals, and actions regarding education and well-being may vary depending upon the audience for their narratives, the medium involved, and the time period in which the narratives are collected. Understanding dyads’ perspectives will help the researchers to advance theories of how families seek to create meaningful lives through both education and familial care in the wake of crisis.

The NSF grant awarded to Mason, Flores and Willen also allows the researchers to build upon their existing expertise in studying the effects of epidemics on societies (Mason), the experiences and pursuits of first-generation college students and their families (Flores), and the experiences of immigrant families and of health inequities in the US (Willen) to examine the impact of Covid-19 on an important and growing population within the US and the Brown community.  

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