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student affairs personnel and how that perception impacted collaboration between
academic affairs and student affairs within the context of a single institution.
This study used a single site case study methodology. It is hoped that the results
of this single site case study can be transferred to other similar sites/situations. As
Merriam (2009) notes, “every study, every case, every situation is theoretically an
example of something else. The general lies in the particular; that is, what we learn in a
particular situation we can transfer or generalize to similar situations subsequently
encountered” (p. 225). However, there are also many unique, contextual variables and
circumstances that might make some of the findings of this case study specific only to
McFeely College or only to small colleges with a profile similar to that of McFeely
College.
It should be noted that exploration of faculty member perceptions of student
affairs personnel does present some challenges. The variety of organizational and
reporting systems, political structures, and staffing models deployed on different college
and university campuses makes comparison and generalization difficult. In addition, each
individual brings his or her own experiences and biases to any relationship, including the
relationship between a qualitative researcher and interviewees. In this case, the
redundancy and commonality expressed by the research participants – that ultimately led
to saturation – makes a case that the experiences observed and recorded by the researcher
are not outliers but represent the faculty experience at McFeely College.
The findings of this study were not exactly what the researcher anticipated before
the study began. Working within the conceptual framework of the primary role of student