Dr. Sasso is research-scholar with 3 distinct lines of research.
Through collaborating with some of the foremost and emerging scholars in higher education and across other disciplines, Dr. Sasso has a
continuous
research agenda that has evolved to address: (1) the college experience; (2) student success; and (3) educational equity across cocurricular spaces. Critical frameworks, descriptive phenomenology, and quantitative methods are utilized to interrogate these research themes.
Dr. Sasso seeks to address a primary and fundamental existential question: What should postsecondary institutions do with and for its students?
Areas of Research.
The College Experience.
Dr. Sasso explores multiple identity development (Abes & Jones, 2013) among traditional undergraduate students through student involvement and leadership experiences such as within fraternity and sororities. He also centers issues of compensatory and protest masculinities among college men through social constructivist and feminist poststructuralism lenses.
Student Success.
Dr. Sasso interrogates issues of student persistence and university retention drawn from a culturally-informed reconceptualization of Tinto’s Academic & Social Integration Model (Guiffrida, 2003). His work attempts to critique the fundamental attribution error of higher education through his pioneering metatheodel approach.
Educational Equity.
Dr. Sasso draws from critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit; Harris, 2016), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1987, 1989), and Border Theory (Anzaldúa, 1987) to foreground liminality across different marginalized or historically underrepresented student populations within their co-curricular spaces. These include bridge programs, residential education, or transition programs.
Scholarly Publications
Dr. Sasso has a continuous record of publication since 2012. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed chapters and articles, 11 books, and over 100 scholarly conference presentations. Selected research is also listed in Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Academia.
Scholarly Presentations
Dr. Sasso has presented over 100 regional and national conferences for the Association for Student Conduct Administrators (ASCA), Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), American College Personnel Association (ACPA), National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), NIRSA: Leaders in Collegiate Recreation, and Southern Association for College Student Affairs (SACSA). He has also facilitated over 30 invited keynote presentations and workshops.
Research Supervision
Dr. Sasso has supervised over 50 masters capstone projects and thesis as well as chaired more than 20 doctoral dissertations. Dr. Sasso has also co-authored many of these projects with students for publication.
Philosophy of Research
Dr. Sasso is both a quantitative and qualitative researcher as well as a critical scholar. Dr. Sasso employs a metatheodel (mutiple theories and models) as a primer for his critical scholarship to interrogate systems of racism, oppression, and power. Drawing from the interpretivist paradigm, his qualitative research uses the descriptive phenomenological psychological method rooted in Husserlian phenomenology as a philosophical foundation (Giorgi, 2009; Husserl, 2008). However, he also possesses competency for quantitative between-groups survey design using stratified and chain-referral sampling methods in which he employs the pragmatic paradigm.