From Whether to When: New Methods for Studying Student Dropout and Teacher Attrition

Abstract

Educational researchers studying student dropout and teacher attrition typically ask whether specific events occur by particular points in time. In this article, we argue that a more powerful and informative way of framing such questions is to ask when the transitions occur. We believe that researchers avoid asking questions about time-to-event (“When?”) because of methodological difficulties introduced when members of the sample do not experience the target events during the data collection period. These people—the students who do not graduate or drop out, the teachers who do not quit—possess censored event times. Until recently, statistical techniques available for analyzing censored data were in their infancy. In this article, we show how the methods of survival analysis (also known as event history analysis) lend themselves naturally to the study of the timing of educational events. Drawing examples from the literature on teacher attrition and student dropout and graduation, we introduce a panoply of survival methods useful for describing the timing of educational transitions and for building statistical models of the risk of event occurrence over time. We hope that this nontechnical introduction to survival methods will help educational researchers articulate and explore important substantive questions that they have raised but have yet to answer.