Communities of Scholarship and Practice
The evolution of research in the journal cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the increasing sophistication of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. University statistical tests were widely used in the early descriptive studies published in the journal. However, as computers became commonplace and advanced statistical programs were accessible from virtually every desktop computer, the complexity of research designs and statistical Replica Tag Heuer Carrera analysis increased exponentially. Similarly, the value of qualitative research and the sophistication in both the research methods and software programs to aid in analysis have emerged within the past 20 years of the journal’s history. The journal published two special issues on qualitative research. Meta-analysis, a statistical technique to integrate multiple quantitative studies measuring the same hypothesis, emerged in the early to mid-1980s. Before that time, attempts to make meaning out of multiple studies were conducted using a narrative review of the research approach.
In 2001, I argued that student affairs are a maturing field of study and practice. Like all such fields, different communities of practice and scholarship emerge based on different assumptions or worldviews about the ways student affairs should be done. Student affairs have developed multiple communities that are separated by different contextual assumptions about the nature and purpose of the work. A review of the student affairs literature across the field from Replica Omega Speedmaster multiple sources shows four separate communities of scholarship, each with a distinct literature. The four communities are student learning, student development, student services, and student administration. The first two of these communities come from an educational perspective and the second two come from a management perspective. Although literature throughout the student affairs field addresses all four communities of scholarship, articles in the JCSD for at least the past 30 years have been almost exclusively from the student learning or student development perspective. Scholarship derived from a student services or student administration perspective have been published rarely in the journal.
In conclusion, early in my career, I thought that editors strongly influenced the direction of scholarship in the field. After serving for 9 years as editor of JCSD, I learned that scholarship takes its own direction and is guided more by the quality of inquiry than the preferences of editors. Decisions are made to publish articles principally on their quality and their appropriateness for the journal. Putting good scholarship in the wrong journal is like putting modern furniture in an antebellum home. It just does not feel right. For the most puns, JCSD has avoided this conflict and, because of it, it has developed a personality that people throughout higher education have come to know and appreciate. JCSD is the product of hundreds of scholars who published their work between its covers, hundreds of reviewers who labored over dozens of manuscripts each year, and 9 editors who devoted their efforts to ensuring that all of that work came together every other month, every year, for the past 50 years, to create a legacy of scholarship, of which every student affairs professional can be proud.
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