Measurement Matters: Estimating Students’ Community Engagement Participation

Abstract

Many community engagement and service-learning studies require the researcher to identify whether or not a particular student has participated in an engagement activity. In this article, the author explores the importance and challenge of measuring college students’ community engagement by detailing one institution’s rigorous effort to answer the question, “What percentage of students participate in community engagement during their time at college?” The article illustrates the results of a study in which an institution supplemented an existing database of student participation with several other nontraditional sources of student participation data to construct an expanded measure of engagement. Results indicated that, compared with the expanded measure, the existing database produced a biased estimate of engagement with regard to gender, race and ethnicity, financial aid, and athletic status. Implications for future research, assessment, and practice are discussed.