Investigating the Imagination of Possible and ‘Like-to-Avoid’ Selves among Higher Education Students from Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds at a Selective English University

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

            I find this paper much improved and having gone a considerable way to addressing the critiques made of it. The revisions made are good ones. To consolidate these improvements, the paper should do one last round of revisions focused on this:

 

Making more explicit the limitations of its data: 

            Footnote 1 noting the limitations of its data should be put into main text and should be strengthened. It should make clear that the sample is very small and cannot be taken as representative of the whole university student population.

            The conclusions should include a limitations paragraph that also repeats the limitation of the paper’s data.  As part of this the paper should make very clear that its findings cannot speak with any force to what personality traits help disadvantaged students reach selective universities (because the paper doesn’t have direct evidence that the absence of those traits was what prevented other disadvantaged from reaching university).  Rather, the paper can speak most directly to the mind-set of students in university and what kind of support services are most useful to them.   The paper should only minimally address university outreach efforts.  Its focus should be on implications for supports for students already at university.

 

Additionally, the paper could benefit from the following:

            Making clear the distinction between aspirations (hopes) and expectations (plans).  It is in the latter that one finds the sharpest social class and race-ethnic differences.

            Elaborating its discussion on how students need to be supported with a sociological understanding of the role of social barriers.  This is a matter of balance.  Students need to not be so aware of those barriers that they are unable to hope for social mobility, but they also need to be aware enough of those barriers that they are not crushed when their individualist self-concept runs into difficulties such academic problems, discrimination, etc. The Black parents in Annette Lareau’s work, Unequal Childhoods,  provide a very useful sense of how they try to balance hope with awareness of social barriers.

            The paper’s point about the importance of early academic success in university in helping disadvantaged students consolidate their university possible selves could be usefully buttressed by Vincent Tinto’s concept of academic integration in his book, Leaving College.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,
Many thanks for your comments and feedback. We have taken into account all of them and list below how we did so. We find that the points you made were relevant, interesting and useful - they greatly helped us further refine and improve the manuscript.
We also would like to apologise that we had left all tracked changes in the manuscript, which made it difficult to read (as pointed out by Reviewer 2). In this version we leave only the tracked changes that highlight the edits we have made on the basis of your comments. This was requested by the Publishers/Editors and since the changes aren’t too many and ‘in blocks’, the manuscript should still be easy to read.

 

Reviewer 1’s comments	Our response
Making more explicit the limitations of its data: Footnote 1 noting the limitations of its data should be put into main text and should be strengthened. It should make clear that the sample is very small and cannot be taken as representative of the whole university student population.	We agree that the small sample size and its implications needs to be stressed more. We have reworded the text from footnote 1 accordingly and included into the main text body (first paragraph Section 3.2).
The conclusions should include a limitations paragraph that also repeats the limitation of the paper’s data. As part of this the paper should make very clear that its findings cannot speak with any force to what personality traits help disadvantaged students reach selective universities (because the paper doesn’t have direct evidence that the absence of those traits was what prevented other disadvantaged from reaching university). Rather, the paper can speak most directly to the mind-set of students in university and what kind of support services are most useful to them. The paper should only minimally address university outreach efforts. Its focus should be on implications for supports for students already at university.	We have included a description of the limitations of the data and conclusions we can at the end of page 20/beginning of page 21. We stress the small sample size and research design, which does not allow for studying the counterfactual or control situation. We also have excluded the discussion of outreach activities and focus instead of on activities to support students at university.
Making clear the distinction between aspirations (hopes) and expectations (plans). It is in the latter that one finds the sharpest social class and race-ethnic differences.	We mention evidence showing that there are no important differences in aspirations between students of different social background in section 2.1 paragraph 2 and 3. To make the distinction between (social stratification in) aspirations and expectations clearer, we also included “They follow-up on the evidence showing that while there are no stark differences in students’ aspirations (i.e. what a student hopes for) between socioeconomic groups, expectations (i.e. what a student thinks will happen and their plans) do vary importantly by social backgrounds (see literature review below).” in paragraph 3 in section 2.1 (page 4).

Reviewer 2 Report

*Please note the copy sent to me here is full of tracking which made it quite hard to read.

There is now quite a body of research on differing  classed motivations for attending HE, but the originality of this piece is to link it to the possible selves framework.  It is based admittedly on a small sample but the authors make that clear and stress it’s limitations . The piece is well written, clearly presented and provides necessary background and reference.

there are one or two small things that need to be addressed. The authors claim that they chose ‘extreme ‘ cases for their two contrasting class groups but they do not explain what they mean by extreme. They should give examples to justify this claim and explain in more detail how and why they chose their particular participants. Looking at the profiles of their 12 respondents they don’t appear  to represent extremes of the class spectrum.

they also state that the first-year of study is the most important time for decision- making.  Why do they claim that ? My own Paired Peers study would refute that. We found that  students at that stage have the haziest idea of their futures. However, there are good reasons I think for choosing first year students to explore motivations- the reasons for choosing HE are clearer in their minds and it is also the ‘make or break’ year when most dropouts occur, especially among less advantaged students. In terms of future aspirations , however, the third-year is where career choices become more stable.

Finally, they might make a bit more out of how their possible selves framework might challenge the ‘limited aspirations’  narrative, as it leads to a more structural approach to choices, as indicated in their discussion 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,
Many thanks for your comments and feedback. We have taken into account all of them and list below how we did so. We find that the points you made were relevant, interesting and useful - they greatly helped us further refine and improve the manuscript.
We also would like to apologise that we had left all tracked changes in the manuscript, which made it difficult to read (as pointed out by Reviewer 2). In this version we leave only the tracked changes that highlight the edits we have made on the basis of your comments. This was requested by the Publishers/Editors and since the changes aren’t too many and ‘in blocks’, the manuscript should still be easy to read.

 

Reviewer 2’s comments	Our response
The authors claim that they chose ‘extreme ‘ cases for their two contrasting class groups but they do not explain what they mean by extreme. They should give examples to justify this claim and explain in more detail how and why they chose their particular participants. Looking at the profiles of their 12 respondents they don’t appear to represent extremes of the class spectrum.	To make clearer what we mean by extreme cases, we extended the statement in the introduction on page 2: “Usually, there is little focus on the more fine-grained differentiation required to study groups at the extreme ends of the socioeconomic scale, i.e. groups with lowest income levels or living in the most deprived areas." We also provide a bit more details in the methodology section where we explain that we use the POLAR-classification to determine who to include in the sample and how to
	assign the different participants to different socioeconomic groups (4th paragraph section 3.2): “These students, and especially those from POLAR Q1, are cases we would assign to the ‘extreme ends’ of the socioeconomic scale, which we mention above.”
they also state that the first-year of study is the most important time for decision- making. Why do they claim that ? My own Paired Peers study would refute that. We found that students at that stage have the haziest idea of their futures. However, there are good reasons I think for choosing first year students to explore motivations- the reasons for choosing HE are clearer in their minds and it is also the ‘make or break’ year when most dropouts occur, especially among less advantaged students. In terms of future aspirations , however, the third-year is where career choices become more stable.	We fully agree with the Reviewer that focussing on first-year students is useful because their decision-making with regard to going to university is still recent and therefore they can recall it better. We had indicated that we focus on first-year students’ decision to go to university and not their professional futures (e.g. paragraph 2 on page 3, research question 1 at the bottom of page 3, paragraph 1 page 13) but to make the benefit of this clearer we have further added “Focusing on first-year students is beneficial because their decision-making with regard to going to university is more recent and ‘fresh’ than for instance for students in their third university year” in the first paragraph of the methodology section 3.2 and “The advantage of studying first-year students was that the experiences and thinking that had shaped their decision to go to university was relatively recent.” in paragraph 1 of the Discussion-section (p. 18).
Finally, they might make a bit more out of how their possible selves framework might challenge the ‘limited aspirations’ narrative, as it leads to a more structural approach to choices, as indicated in their discussion	We are grateful to the reviewer to point us to this positive aspect of using the possible selves theory ‘instead’ of the typical aspirations-approach. To stress this point we have included “This association between social structure and students’ plans and projections is also what makes the possible selves theory more useful for explaining social inequalities in HE participation than the typical aspirations-approach of some of the recent policy and research.” In the discussion section (paragraph 2 on page 20).

 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting paper that begins to test a new conceptual framework to explain the individual and sociocultural influences on whether a young person participates in higher education and what might be done to change their pathway.

My main concern about this paper is that the body of data is relatively small, with just 12 interviews.  I think that the authors can reasonably present their work as an exploratory study that aims to discover whether the concepts in Harrison's framework emerge naturally in students' discussions of their pathways into higher education (which they appear to do).  At the moment, I think that the authors are somewhat overclaiming about the effects of these concepts on the individuals involved and their importance in determining patterns of participation.  This can be resolved readily through a reframing of the paper.

On page 8, the authors say that they have taken a deductive thematic analysis approach.  I don't think that the reference to Braun and Clarke can be right here as their work lays out the processes and principles of inductive analysis, although they do briefly define deductive analysis.  With a deductive analysis, the author really need to lay out what it is they expect, drawing on the theory, to find in the data - this is implicit in a few places, but not ever explicit.  This really needs a paragraph exploring what data they might expect to find that would support the analytical value of Harrison's theoretical framework - e.g. that participants talk freely about issues of control over their lives or that certain future selves are unacceptable.  This then needs to be pulled through into the conclusion and would also help with answering the points in the previous paragraph.

My other comments are broadly sequential through the paper:

Page 2 - Participation of disadvantaged students in Russell Group universities isn't just low, but largely static too.  It is asserted that outreach work has increased participation, but there is not strong causal evidence for this in the literature or national statistics.  Indeed, participation rates have closely mirrored improvements in school results on a national basis and the role of outreach is therefore moot. Page 2 - Harrison's framework based on the theory of possible selves is new, but the underpinning theory is 30 years old.  The authors need to be careful not to confuse the theory and the framework throughout - Harrison's work applies the (old) theory to a new context. Page 2 - this is handled later (with reference to POLAR), but it would be useful to have an earlier signpost as to what disadvantage is taken to mean in this context. Page 4 - the discussion of the literature around aspirations and expectations slips unhelpfully into some assumptions around causal relationships (e.g. around line 156).  Aspirations and expectations here could simply be acting as a proxy - more care with language is needed. Page 6 - I note the authors' practice of alternating between male and female pronouns throughout.  I understand what they are doing, but it jars in the text and also rather reinforces gender binaries.  Page 7 - it's pretty obvious from the description that the research site is the University of Exeter (indeed, this is stated on page 8).  The authors need to decide whether they want to anonymise the site or not. Page 9 - I think an important point is being missed here.  The advantaged students are the positive self being a student (i.e. social, sporting etc.) whereas the disadvantaged students are valorising a possible self as a graduate (i.e. good income, chance to turn life around, move out of the area).  This, for me, is a vitally important distinction and quite clear in the data. Page 10 - the quote that starts on line 410 is clearly talking about expectations that the student has.  This should be signposted in the text - it makes clear the distinction between aspirations and expectations discussed previously. As a general note, the data itself is very rich - this speaks for the usefulness of the timeline approach. Page 10 - the authors are insufficiently careful about distinguishing between self-efficacy and locus of control.  These are conceptually distinct and not variation on a theme.  For example, someone can believe that they can complete a task, but attribute this to luck or the actions of others (i.e. high SE, but low LoC).  Conversely, they might feel that their actions can alter the world, but believe that they are inept and so they won't (i.e. high LoC, but low SE).  More care is needed here and throughout. Page 11 - going back to my earlier point, I think there is a distinction here between self as student and self as graduate. Page 11 - I think a point is being missed in the discussion of SE and LoC for the advantaged students.  For them, the belief that they can succeed and influence events is ingrained and natural, so they wouldn't necessarily vocalise it without prompting.  Their experience of life is that they make things happen in their life without necessarily having to apply themselves. Page 12 - the quote at line 506 shows clear evidence of high SE and LoC and this could be pulled out more clearly.  The student believed that if they retook, they could do better. Page 12 and 13 - somewhere in the discussion, LoC has been conflated with a neoliberal outlook and/or structural constraints and I don't think this is substantiated by the data.  People with high LoC don't necessarily think that their successes are just down to their own 'talent' and hard work - they just believe that if they work hard it will probably be rewarded in some way and to some extent. The text needs a strong proof read - some sections rather too informal in tone and some wrong words (e.g. right/write, councillor/counsellor).

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper applies an interesting framework, “possible selves” theory, to explain student trajectories in higher education.    Unfortunately, the paper has some quite significant methodological limitations that undercut its intentions.

 

The paper’s findings are based on a highly problematic sample. Around 5000 full-time students at a university were solicited to join the study, but only 24 students volunteered and only 14 were eventually selected to be interviewed (p. 7). This raises major issues of selection bias. Were the volunteers in any way representative of the student body?  The paper provides no evidence of how the demographics of the interviewees compare to those of the university.  For example, only one out of the 14 students was a student of color; is the proportion similarly low at the university?  In any case, did the fact that the interviewees had to volunteer to be interviewed bias the sample toward students who had some other personality or social characteristics that made them unusual, such as above average self-confidence?

 

The paper’s analysis and even intent are at odds with its sample. At various points the paper uses its interviewees to talk about what qualities affected university entrance, even though it acknowledges on p. 12 that its sample does not actually allow this. 

            For example, the paper notes that for disadvantaged students, information about how to get into university and about financial support were essential to their assessment of going to university (p. 9).  This may be true of the university students but is this necessarily true of disadvantaged students who considered university and did not attend university or did attend but dropped out?  The only way to tell would be to have a sample of students who did not attend university or dropped out, but the paper reports no such sample.   

            The paper argues that the disadvantaged students had a higher level of self efficacy and internal locus of control than more advantaged students (p. 10). Again, would this apply to disadvantaged students who were not in the sample because they had dropped out?   

            The paper argues that less advantaged students tended to put less emphasis on the social aspects of university life and friend and more on the academic side (p. 12).  This may be true of those who attend university but perhaps not of working class students who considered university but chose not to, perhaps because they wanted to fit in socially and questioned whether this would happen at university. 

 

The recommendations in the concluding paragraph of the paper (p. 13) do not seem to flow in any obvious way from its findings. Particularly because the paper does not have data on students who considered university but chose not to attend, it is not clear how it can really speak about the necessary qualities of pre-university outreach.

 

The paper argues that the disadvantaged students’ narratives of locus of control and self-efficacy belie social and cultural theories that emphasize structural barriers (p. 13). To a degree this is true, but those theories also argue that this individualist narrative also allows those structural barriers to work all the more effectively because students misrecognize them and do not adequately draw on all the resources (personal, familial, and institution) needed to overcome them. 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

This could have been potentially an interesting and timely paper. However, the manuscript has several weaknesses mostly around its methodology (please, see more detailed feedback attached) and its theoretical contribution.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf