A closer look at ourselves: Ideology, research methodology, and specialization in American education research

What is the ideological position of American education research? What role do Education Schools play in contributing to the field's overall ideological position? Considered in conjunction with the question of ideology, do factors like research methodology and specialization present themselves as formidable influences across the field? This dissertation explores wide epistemic terrain, but these questions are at the heart of it. The first two questions are hypothesis-driven questions that I address directly, while the third constitutes a dimension that emerges as significant in light of the findings presented herein.;To address hypothesis-driven questions, I construct ideological dictionaries by utilizing Concordance analyses of texts in ideological consumption networks on Amazon.com. Essentially this amounts to identifying the words (concepts) that are used by the intellectual left in education, but not by the right---and vice versa. Ideological words are then used to search the titles and abstracts of submissions to the 2006 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Aggregating word "hits" to the ideological level allows for assessment of whether AERA, as a measure of American educational research writ large, is ideologically positioned in terms of the issues it emphasizes and deems worthy of scholarly attention.;With word counts recorded and aggregated at the submission level, three analyses are conducted. The first assesses the ideological position of AERA as a whole. It also rank orders the ideological propensities of different AERA divisions and special interest groups (SIGs) by looking at the submissions that AERA attracts. The second utilizes logistic regression to determine if ideological language contributes to the likelihood of submission acceptance. The third uses a generalized linear model (logit link, binomial family) to explore whether institutional affiliation (Education Schools) helps to predict the ideological position of accepted AERA submissions. Descriptive analysis of the AERA dataset also occurs. The role of several factors, including research methodology and specialization, are explored and depicted.;Summary of findings. As regards the first empirical question listed above, it is reasonably clear that AERA is ideologically positioned toward the intellectual left, by a factor of approximately 1.7:1. Another way of framing this evidence is to say that on a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 representing the intellectual right and 1 representing the intellectual left, AERA is positioned at approximately .629. In other words, slightly less than two-thirds of (all) the ideological words used at AERA belong to the intellectual left.;Though the evidence suggests that ideology plays in role in shaping the submissions that AERA attracts, it is less clear that ideology plays a role in determining which papers are accepted at AERA. As regards the latter, the evidence suggests that a number of other factors, including area of study, type of submission, and research methodology are far more important in determining which submissions are accepted at AERA. These factors, though not central to the original hypotheses of this research, hold significant implications and warrant further attention.;As regards the second empirical question listed above, the role that Education Schools play in shaping the overall ideological position of AERA is found to be a formidable factor of influence. It is not, however, found to be the sole factor of influence. Indeed, the evidence suggests that though affiliation with an Education School is a significant predictor in less complex models, it offers less explanatory power in broader models. In the latter, research methodology and participation within particular areas of study are found to be more significant predictors.;Taken as a whole, this dissertation produces many findings, not one. As a result, the upshot of my analyses isn't easily reduced to a sound byte. There does appear to be straightforward evidence that AERA is positioned toward the intellectual left. However, this bent is perhaps not as extreme as sometimes claimed. Further, while there does appear to be clear evidence that affiliation with an education school contributes to the overall ideological position of AERA, this effect holds less weight when considering substantive areas of study within the field of education (irrespective of the fact that such areas of study are primarily concentrated within education schools). To make matters more interesting, several variables in addition to ideology, including field structure and research methodology, present themselves as holding sway on the current instantiation of education knowledge. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...