Qualitative Research On Educational Life Of Economically Disadvantaged Undergraduates

At present,a large amount of economically disadvantaged undergraduates is existing in Chinese Universities,and the modern competitive society highlights their growth disadvantages.'13th Five-Year Education Plan for poverty alleviation' stresses the necessity to provide economically disadvantaged undergraduates with compensations,which indicates the progress of social civilization.Exploring the educational life of economically disadvantaged undergraduates and their needs for growth support based on current funding system is the basis for implementing targeted measures of education poverty alleviation,which has theoretical and practical significance.Economically disadvantaged undergraduates refer to the college students at the level of undergraduate education,they are in weak position among the whole undergraduates because of the poor family economic condition.According to William James' self-theory,'the ego' can be divided into three dimensions,which are material self,spiritual self and social self.The material self is the ego of outside the physical body;the spiritual self is the individual mind;and the social self involves the interpersonal communication.So economically disadvantaged undergraduates experience educational life in the three dimensions of material,social and spiritual.The existing related literature involves material life,social life and spiritual life of this vulnerable group,but the emphasis is often on the material life.It Occasionally discusses about social life and spiritual life,so further study is needed.Dividing the living world of economically disadvantaged undergraduates into three dimensions is quite innovative from the perspective of 'education life theory'.On this foundation,empirical qualitative research based on the interview corpus can deeply describe the education life of economically disadvantaged undergraduates,and their compensation needs.From Z University,14 economically disadvantaged undergraduates were selected to take part in semi-structured interviews,and the interview recordings were converted to text,forming 90,988 words corpus.Then according to the methodology of grounded theory,the study implemented opening coding,axial coding and selective coding for the collected interview materials using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo11.0 as the auxiliary tool.The study finally concluded three rank coding dimensions,they are 'material life','social life' and 'spiritual life',which conforms with the presupposition of our earlier theory research.The study also clustered the corpus,from the tree-map we could tell that interviewees mostly discuss about the difference between economically disadvantaged undergraduates and their counterparts in spiritual life as well as their individual learnings and life planning.In social life,they referred mainly to public activity participation and interpersonal relationships.As in terms of material life,economically disadvantaged undergraduates chiefly talked about their evaluation on the material aids and their own economic conditions.Through discourse analysis of interview materials,in material life,the study found that the economic resources of economically disadvantaged undergraduates are mainly dependent on their parents,which leads to their tight economic situation,frugal consumption ideas and single way of life.Although material aids offered by the state reduced the family burdens to a certain extent,there are still some rough problems such as 'who is the best poorer contest' in the process of economically disadvantaged undergraduates' identification,which exposes their privacy.In the aspect of spiritual life,many economically disadvantaged undergraduates show some psychic characteristics,such as Inferiority,lack of confidence,sensitivity and suspicion.They also encounter a few challenges in the learning process.In terms of social life,due to lack of common topics between economically disadvantaged undergraduates and other students,the former is hard to integrate into the latter group,leading them to become 'outsiders'.Economically disadvantaged undergraduates are relatively passive in interpersonal communications,they prefer to associate with people who have similar experiences,so they have a narrow network of contacts.On the whole,the existing funding measures improved the material life of economically disadvantaged undergraduates,but they still face many challenges in spiritual life,and has limited interpersonal communications in social life.In order to make economically disadvantaged undergraduates get better and fairer growth,Universities should offer disadvantaged compensations to them,including reasonably identification,precise and efficient support;professional guides,which will help them social growth;and purposefully spiritual compensations for them to construct reasonable spiritual self.