Image: Kelly Rosinger (Ph.D. 2015) co-authored an article in Educational Researcher (volume 48, issue 5) on potential pitfalls of using Pell Grant eligibility to estimate income data in research. Rosinger and co-author, Karly S. Ford, acknowledge the attractiveness of using grant status as a commonly available marker for identifying lower income students. Drawing comparisons with the free and reduced-price lunch data, the authors note that researchers have investigated the appropriateness and limitations of lunch data. They seek to start the conversation and work for similar analyses of the Pell Grant data. In the abstract of "Pell Grant Versus Income Data in Postsecondary Research," the authors state, "We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges’ economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students." Full article available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19852102 Type of News/Audience: Alumni
