Exploring Faculty Perspectives on Community Engaged Scholarship: The Case for Q Methodology

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, community engaged scholarship has grown in popularity, practice, and scholarship. A review of the literature suggests that a wide range of personal, professional, institutional, and communal factors (Demb & Wade, 2012) interact in ways that shape faculty members' perspectives on, conceptualizations of, and means of conducting community engaged work. To make sense of the potential number of factor combinations and inform more customized support for community engaged faculty, the authors discuss the merits and utility of faculty typologies. Q Methodology offers a way to create a typology that is capable of not only managing the complexity of faculty engagement, but also providing rich descriptions of varied points of view that do not oversimplify the phenomenon. The techniques and foundational assumptions of Q Methodology are described, making the case for Q as a good fit for developing a typology of community engaged faculty that more fully reflects multiple points of view.