Book cover for Connections Are Everything: A College Student's Guide to Relationship-Rich Education by Peter Felten, Leo M. Lambert, Isis Artze-Vega, and Oscar R. Miranda Tapia. An illustration of a female student in graduation cap and gown is surrounded by illustrations of various people (other students, professors, and many other people) -- all these people are connected by lines, forming a network.
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ISBN: 9781421443126

Johns Hopkins University Press, July 2023

In our research for this book, we build on studies done by many other scholars. We added to that existing work by interviewing about 450 students, faculty, and staff from more than 30 colleges and universities across the U.S.—including existing interviews Leo and Peter conducted for Relationship-Rich Education, and new Zoom-based student interviews conducted (mostly in 2021) by Isis, Leo, Peter, and Oscar.

Prior to each interview, participants gave written consent to be interviewed and recorded, following a research plan approved by the Elon University Institutional Review Board. We recorded and transcribed all of the interviews. We lightly edited quotations for the book to make them more readable (we don’t always speak as clearly as we’d like!). We then took the quotes we planned to use in the book back to the person we interviewed to receive specific approval to use that quote and their name.

The research for this book builds on the work Leo and Peter did for Relationship-Rich Education. See the research details of that book, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).