Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Data to Elicit the Complexity of Students' Self-Efficacy

Researchers have shown self-efficacy – one's confidence in their abilities to complete a task – predicts persistence and achievement in science. Within academia, students may encounter threats or supports to their self-efficacy that may influence their persistence in the sciences. To examine these threatening or supportive moments in a student's experience, we employed a mixed methods approach coupling the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) with individualized daily journal prompts. The ESM, a quantitative technique that uses surveys to measure students' domain-specific self-efficacy in-the-moment, was integrated with qualitative individualized daily journal prompts to further explore how moments in students' daily life related to their self-efficacy. In this talk, we will present results across two iterations of data collection to demonstrate how adding a point of integration between the quantitative and qualitative strands changed the way the individualized daily journal prompts were written to elicit information about students' self-efficacy.