Empowering communities through social media

Evaluating Efforts to Address Campus Sexual Violence: Developing a Data Ecosystem

Sexual violence is well documented as a major problem on college campuses, and the delivery of service and programs at institutions of higher education (IHE) has proliferated over recent years. However, the implementation of these efforts has often outpaced the field's work in developing evaluation models. Many institutions depend on campus climate surveys for data to inform their efforts, yet there are multiple data points that can be accessed to provide a more holistic picture of efforts to address sexual violence on campus. The data ecosystem framework provided by Driver-Linn & Svenson (2017) offers a comprehensive approach for assessing efforts to address campus sexual violence (CSV), but implementation models are needed that connect evaluation and practice, take local context into account, and lead to changes on campus. This paper presents a case study from a multisite university to describe the process of implementing a "data ecosystem" to assess the institutions' efforts to effectively address CSV, and how the data was used by practitioners and administrators. The collaborative, utilization-driven model has provided valuable data to inform the delivery of services and programs across the university yet has limitations and requires a wide range of resources to sustain.

White Supremacy and Counseling Psychology: A Critical–Conceptual Framework

The mainstreaming of White nationalism in the United States and worldwide suggests an urgent need for counseling psychologists to take stock of what tools they have (and do not have) to combat White supremacy. We review the rise of social justice issues in the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions and point to the limits of existing paradigms to address the challenge of White supremacy. We introduce transnationalism as an important theoretical perspective with which to conceptualize global racisms, and identify White racial affect, intersectionality, and allyship as three key domains of antiracist action research. Finally, we suggest three steps for sharpening counseling psychologists’ approaches to social justice: rejecting racial progress narratives, engaging in social justice-oriented practice with White clients, and centering White supremacy as a key problem for the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions.

Assessing Google reviews to monitor student experience

Purpose

The emergence of social media has provided an alternative mechanism for students to provide and access online reviews about universities. These forms of feedback are often not systematically monitored and interpreted by universities. The purpose of this paper is to analyse quantitative ratings and qualitative comments provided by students via Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. The qualitative comments were analysed via thematic coding which identified four key themes including quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. The data were also subjected to automated content analysis using the text analytics software Leximancer to enhance the objectivity and reliability of findings.

Design/methodology/approach

The study involved the extraction of quantitative ratings as well as qualitative comments from Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. Each university was searched on Google and their rating and comments were collected as of August 2019. The qualitative data were included in an Excel spreadsheet along with the name of the universities, and their quantitative ratings. Using thematic coding techniques, the qualitative data were manually coded into four themes: quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. Furthermore, the qualitative comments were grouped into two categories: positive comments and negative comments.

Findings

The paper argues the need for universities to actively monitor these new forms of student feedback which have provided autonomy and freedom for students and other stakeholders to access and provide 24/7 feedback. The study found common themes emerging from the positive and negative student comments related to: quality of teaching, course design, learning environments and administrative support. These aspects contributed to the students’ satisfaction levels when they reflected on their educational experience on Google reviews. The study also found that institutions with high numbers of negative comments tend to have lower ratings compared to those with positive comments.

Research limitations/implications

The study did not use other learning analytic tools to measure and assess the feedback from students using social media and other forms of feedback.

Originality/value

Many studies have been undertaken on student experience. Studies have focussed on the experience of home and international students, on-campus and online students, and students from various underrepresented backgrounds. So far no study has been undertaken on the reviews provided by students using Google reviews.