Extracting and Validating Change Components at Universities with a Mixed – Methods Approach

The main aim of this study was to extract and validate the change components at Universities. The research method was sequential exploratory mixed methods design with tool making type. In the qualitative phase, qualitative case study was used and the targeted phenomenon (change) was deeply investigated based on studying the documents and resources by document mining method. Data gathering was done until the data was theoretically saturated. In order to evaluate the qualitative data, theme analysis as well as Nvivo software were used. The results revealed the existence of five organizing themes with regard to change at the university. Finally, the theme network of knowing change components at universities was designed and it was validated through reliability and credibility using the data triangulation. In the quantitative phase, the research method was descriptive -survey. The participants included all managers of Shiraz University (138 people). Using Morgan table, 103 were chosen by simple random sampling method, among whom 98 people completely answered the questionnaires. The research instrument included the change evaluation scale at universities which was designed based on the theme network of knowing the change components at universities in qualitative part and distributed and gathered after calculating its validity and reliability. The findings revealed that the dominant aspects of the change at the investigated university were environmental, structural, human resources, symbolic, and political, respectively and a significant difference was seen between the mean of the mentioned aspects.