Institutions of higher education have long been plagued with difficulty in overcoming the high rates of incompletion of candidates who enroll in doctoral programs. As we continue to move through the post-pandemic era, online course delivery in doctoral programs continues to rise which brings an added layer of difficulty for EdD students to persist…

Although three articles in this special issue address three very different social groupings--gender, ethnicity, and academic needs--they all highlight why inclusion is important for students' healthy development. The authors make specific suggestions for how schools might promote a more inclusive and welcoming climate for their students.…

Cara Hoffman's work enacts George Orwell's imperative to "pay attention to the obvious" (an idea that several sympathetic characters repeat in her 2011 novel "So Much Pretty"), probing aspects of twenty-first century life in the United States that have become so accepted as to be unremarkable, such as epidemic levels of…

Unemployment is a stark reality in today's economic climate, and many Americans report a fear of loss or decrease in social status as a result of unexpected unemployment. Despite vocational psychology's emphasis on work as a domain of life, very little exploration on how social class shifts impact workers has been conducted. One way to rectify the…

This article provides the rationale for doing research on childlessness and parenthood in late life. Childless older adults have been rendered invisible in the social scientific literature. A central goal of this issue is to make them visible and to expose unstated assumptions about normal adult life. Parenthood emerges as a key organizer of the…

The attribution of low literacy levels among Gypsy children to difficulties of access to schools neglects underlying sociocultural explanations. There has been little analysis in reports/studies of Gypsy attitudes toward literacy, nor of outcomes of acquisition. Informed by new literacy theory and by the discourse of previous ethnographic studies,…

Based on data drawn from an empirical research project in four UK universities, this article presents a picture of student positions in undergraduate classes as a product of the relationship between the discursive fields of discipline, institution and gender. It begins by providing a description of some contrasting features of academic…