Racial Discrimination in Colleges: The African Students’ Experiences

Observation

The observation that has been made is that African students attending college in America are faced by various challenges. This is shown by the way most of them do not seem to be motivated in going to school. Further, dominant groups of people which in this case are the Native American students in most cases attempt to have beliefs that justify their social behaviors.

Hypothesis

The African students in American colleges have continuously faced discrimination from fellow students and even from their faculties.

Experiment

For this experiment, data will be collected from African students from three universities within the United States. Particularly, 40 students will be selected and they will be divided into 10 focus groups. The purpose of using the focus groups for data collection will be because they ensure the interaction of the researcher with the participants, further, it is easier to get responses other than the verbal ones from the participants for example by observation of body languages.

Further, data will also be collected by means of questionnaires. The control group will be taken to be another group of African student but who are not involved in the process of gathering data. For these ones, the researcher will use participant observation so as to observe their behaviors and the situations that they go through.

The dependent variable will be racial discrimination. The independent variables will be the African-American student interactions, students-faculty interactions, racial tension and segregation. Data that will be collected will be both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data will be collected in that the participants will be given the opportunity to express their ideas and the levels to which they feel that they are being discriminated against.

Quantitative data will be collected in that the participants will be able to rate their interaction with fellow students, their faculties and the levels of tension caused by racial discrimination. For instance in terms of percentages and these will be assigned nominal values. Less than 20% = 1, 20-40% = 2, 40-60% = 3, 60-80% = 4 and above 80% = 5.

Data that will be obtained from observation will be compared with that obtained from the feedback given by the participating students. For instance, the levels of observed tension among African students will be compared with the percentages cited by the participating students. This will be by analysis of the notes taken by the researcher during observation and the information given by the participants.

It is expected that the hypothesis will be true and the results obtained will be consistent with the topic of study. Racial discriminations are expected to be observed in class settings. This is because the American students being the dominants will tend to view the Africans as a minority group and thus they will ignore them. This is further expected to be depicted in interaction of African students with their faculties. Since the faculties are headed by Americans, chances of them looking down upon the African students are high.

Data graphing