Teaching undergraduates with quantitative data in the social sciences at University of California Santa Barbara

The interview data was gathered for a project that investigated the practices of instructors who use quantitative data to teach undergraduate courses within the Social Sciences. The study was undertaken by employees of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library, who participated in this research project with 19 other colleges and universities across the U.S. under the direction of Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R is a New York-based research organization, which, among other goals, seeks to develop strategies, services, and products to meet evolving academic trends to support faculty and students.

The field of Social Sciences has been notoriously known for valuing the contextual component of data and increasingly entertaining more quantitative and computational approaches to research in response to the prevalence of data literacy skills needed to navigate both personal and professional contexts. Thus, this study becomes particularly timely to identify current instructors’ practi..., The project followed a qualitative and exploratory approach to understand current practices of faculty teaching with data. The study was IRB approved and was exempt by the UCSB’s Office of Research in July 2020 (Protocol 1-20-0491). 

The identification and recruitment of potential participants took into account the selection criteria pre-established by Ithaka S+R: a) instructors of courses within the Social Sciences, considering the field as broadly defined, and making the best judgment in cases the discipline intersects with other fields; b) instructors who teach undergraduate courses or courses where most of the students are at the undergraduate level; c) instructors of any rank, including adjuncts and graduate students; as long as they were listed as instructors of record of the selected courses; d) instructors who teach courses were students engage with quantitative/computational data. 

The sampling process followed a combination of strategies to more easily identify instructo..., The data folder contains 10 pdf files with de-identified transcriptions of the interviews and the pdf files with the recruitment email and the interview guide.Â