Launching a Successful Research Program at a Teaching University

Robert S. Ryan, Avidan Milevsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138638877
• eBook ISBN: 9781315516554
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research in Education
• Index: Psychology

This practical guide addresses the challenges for building and maintaining a college research program in an environment that does not focus on supporting research activity and for those with a heavy teaching load. The challenges faced by teacher-researchers and solutions to issues are reviewed. The steps for maximizing research productivity are outlined: time management, obtaining research space and equipment and funding, recruiting and managing human subjects, and overcoming bureaucratic stumbling blocks. Chapters feature opening vignettes, examples, cases, figures, tables, summaries, suggested readings, and research references which provide a scientific grounding.

Highlights include coverage of:
-The latest time saving digital resources including automatic literature search alerts, Zotero for managing literature, Dropbox for sharing files, Open Science for managing workflow, and OpenSesame and OpenStax Tutor.
-Strategies for recruiting subjects such as flyers and posting lab meeting minutes on a web page.
- How to increase research productivity while still engaging in effective teaching.
-The problems of the availability of human subjects and strategies for recruiting from classes, offering extra credit for research participation, and participation as a course requirement.
- Using students as volunteer research assistants and strategies for recruiting and managing volunteers along with ethical considerations.
-Bureaucratic stumbling blocks and strategies for overcoming those challenges.
- How to use browser/word processor add-ons that store and organize literature in a searchable library and produce citations and reference lists.
-The use of free open source software to design experiments and collect data and free cloud based resources to store electronic research files.

The steps for maximizing research productivity are outlined in chapter 1: time management, obtaining research space and equipment and funding, recruiting and managing human subjects, and overcoming bureaucratic stumbling blocks, along with impediments and solutions for establishing a research program. Strategies to overcome time constraints including automatic literature searches, Zotero for managing your literature, Dropbox for sharing files, and the Open Science Framework for managing workflow are provided in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 provides tips on obtaining funding. Chapters 4 and 5 provide strategies for recruiting and managing research participants such as ad hoc recruiting from classes, offering extra credit for research participation, and participation as a course requirement. The book concludes with a review of other items to consider when developing a research program.

Intended for professional development or teacher training courses offered in masters and doctoral programs in colleges and universities or as a supplement in graduate level research methods courses, this book is also an invaluable resource for faculty development centers and university administrators. Designed for both early career and veteran teacher-researchers looking to enhance their research productivity, this book appeals to college teachers of all levels and disciplines.

1
INTRODUCTION

After Reading This Chapter You Will Understand

• The main objectives of this book

• The five typical challenges faced by faculty looking to engage in effective teaching and productive research

• The way the current book responds to each of these five challenges

Introduction

You decided to read this book for one of two reasons. First, you are a new faculty member and are trying to figure out how to combine being effective in your teaching with establishing a thriving research program.

Alternatively, you may find yourself in a different situation. You may have been teaching for many years already and you are slowly learning that in order to advance even in teaching institutions you may need to enhance your research productivity (Fairweather, 2005). You may be looking for some guidance on how to continue your teaching effectiveness while growing your research efforts.

Being both an effective teacher and productive researcher require effort and creativity. This book is going to teach you many techniques to be able to streamline both your teaching and your research, thus producing a healthy, and fruitful, balance between the two. However, this book is not just about learning how to balance a full teaching load and a productive research program. This book is ultimately about job satisfaction.

The Book’s Objective

The field of organizational theory has produced over the years a considerable amount of research on job satisfaction (Cranny, Smith, & Stone, 1992). However, research on job satisfaction in academia is relatively limited (Terpstra & Honoree, 2004). There are several elements that are known about broader job satisfaction that have been applied to our understanding of job satisfaction in academia.

Job satisfaction has been viewed from economic, psychological, sociological, and ethnographic viewpoints (Bozeman & Gaughan, 2011). In an attempt to find some parsimony in job satisfaction research, several theoretical propositions have suggested that job satisfaction can be categorized into two broader components—one being intrinsic job satisfaction and the other being extrinsic job satisfaction (Kalleberg, 1977; Seifert & Umbach, 2008). Intrinsic job satisfaction is the extent to which the work engaged in is self-motivating, interesting, enlightening, and internally satisfying. On the other hand, extrinsic job satisfaction is driven by external aspects of the job which may ultimately lead to satisfaction. These external aspects include financial related arrangements such as salary, benefits, and a sense of having a secure job. Furthermore, extrinsic satisfaction may be derived from social opportunities that the job offers such as relationships with co-workers.

In truth, although the intrinsic versus extrinsic job satisfaction dichotomy helps in offering an organized view on job satisfaction more broadly, in practice, intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of job satisfaction constantly interact (Bozeman & Gaughan, 2011). For example, when an academic publishes a paper in a prestigious journal, which usually would produce a sense of job satisfaction, this satisfaction entails both intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions. Intrinsically, there is a sense of satisfaction of having produced an exceptional piece of writing. However, there are also extrinsic advantages to the publication as it may assist in promotion and ultimately higher pay.

Studies on job satisfaction in academia have highlighted several factors that may impact both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction. For example, a considerable literature exists on gender differences in job satisfaction among university faculty members. Studies have shown that females consistently report lower job satisfaction than males (Sabharwal & Corley, 2009; Seifert & Umbach, 2008; Turner, 2002; Turner & Myers, 2000). Additionally, studies have also shown race to be a factor in job satisfaction. Studies have indicated that faculty of color report lower job satisfaction than white faculty members (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2008). Research has also shown that academic job satisfaction may also be a function of geographic region (Gabbidon & Higgins, 2012). Other non-demographic factors that may impact job satisfaction include level of autonomy at work, type of discipline, marital and family status, rank, pay, and even religiosity (Bozeman & Gaughan, 2011; Gabbidon & Higgins, 2012; Hagedorn, 2000; Watson, Storey, Wynarczyk, Keasey, & Short, 1996). Having greater autonomy, working in the hard sciences, being married and having children, being tenured and promoted, receiving higher wages, and self-reporting of religious belief and involvement have all been shown to be related to job satisfaction.

Regardless of all these factors, studies are pretty clear that working with limited job satisfaction is linked with stress, burnout, seeking other jobs in academia, and ultimately leaving academia altogether (Hagedorn, 1996; Rosser, 2004). On the other hand, elevated job satisfaction is associated with better mental and physical health and with overall life satisfaction (Cranny, Smith, & Stone, 1992).

Examining the aggregate information from all the indicated factors that may contribute to job satisfaction in academia, two overarching factors have been highlighted as the main elements in determining job satisfaction in academia: research productivity and having a healthy work/life balance (Bozeman & Gaughan, 2011; Gabbidon & Higgins, 2012).

This brings us to the objective of this book. Knowing how to streamline both your teaching and research work by managing time, using all available resources, and utilizing a growing reservoir of electronic tools for both teaching and research, will lead to greater productivity and better time and work management. This will ultimately produce greater job satisfaction.

The Five Typical Challenges

Taking into account the importance of productivity and finding a healthy balance between home and work, there are five specific areas that faculty members could focus on in creating an environment that is conducive to personal achievement. The five areas are: time management issues, obtaining space, equipment, and other resources, issues of the availability of human subjects, using undergraduate students as research assistants, and bureaucratic stumbling blocks common in university systems.

Time Constraints

People think that with the limited hours of actual teaching, faculty members must have an abundant amount of time to focus on all areas of their career and home life. However, when taking into account the amount of time it takes to prepare for classes, review class material, grade papers and tests, work individually with students during office hours and beyond, together with the growing importance of committee work and the hours spent on sitting through committee meetings, in addition to post-committee work, coupled with attempting to grow a research program, at the end of the day faculty members find themselves constrained by time. This often leads to necessitating staying extra hours in the evenings or even engaging in work over the weekends.

Particularly if you are an early career academic just the amount of time you need to spend preparing for class may prevent you from being able to engage in any meaningful research.

If you are employed by a liberal arts college or a university focused more on teaching, you may be teaching three or even four courses a semester. This may translate into between 12 and 15 hours of classroom time. Add to this the several hours you need to prepare for each hour of classroom instruction together with grading papers, preparing exams, and grading exams, and you may find very little time for other activities. An additional consideration is that in teaching institutions you may be teaching large sections of the course with little assistance from graduate students. In more of the larger research institutions, faculty members often utilize the help of graduate teaching assistants for a lot of the extra class work including grading and other administrative work. However, at schools with limited graduate programs, faculty members need to find creative ways of streamlining their work to be able to manage classroom time and have the ability of engaging in meaningful research as well.

Needing to keep up with all the necessary work produces a considerable amount of time pressure. This tension contributes to work-related stress, minimizes productivity, and ultimately infringes on the healthy balance between work and family. Having specific suggestions in order to manage time more productively can go a long way in minimizing work stress, increasing productivity, and enhancing job satisfaction.

Obtaining Space, Equipment, and Other Resources

A second area of focus that can assist in increasing productivity and managing the overall balance of work and home is knowing the ins and outs of obtaining research space, equipment, and other resources to engage in a productive research program. It is not always clear at the get go how exactly space, equipment, and resources are obtained. Although these issues may be peripherally discussed during an academic job interview, the realities of the situation may not become evident until the job actually begins.

As the first couple of weeks and months of an academic career begin, it becomes even more evident that obtaining research space, equipment, and resources requires some effort. Part of the process requires knowing how to navigate the university system in order to obtain the necessary research space, equipment, and many other resources in order to launch a productive research program. Often the lack of clarity on these issues can create work-related stress which ultimately will interfere with overall productivity and will impair job satisfaction.

On the other hand, possessing the right type of research space and equipment can help streamline your research making it more productive. In addition to having space to store your materials and your equipment, having work space offers your research students, as discussed in Chapter 5, a place for them to conduct research, collect data, enter data, and engage in various other lab-related tasks. Having a designated space for students to work on your research adds a level of authority and importance to your research which, in turn, motivates students to engage more fervently in your research.

Having the information necessary, understanding the ins and outs of obtaining research space, equipment, and other resources, and minimizing the time spent on navigating the system by streamlining the process will all be helpful for engaging in a productive research program.

This will ultimately produce greater job satisfaction.

Availability of Human Subjects

A third area of information necessary in order to engage in a productive research program leading to greater job satisfaction is issues relating to the availability and access to human subjects. This is particularly relevant in disciplines that utilize human subjects for research such as social work, criminal justice, psychology, counseling, and education. You may have some great ideas in terms of research questions to investigate; however, if you do not have access to human subjects for data collection all these ideas will ultimately remain as ideas. Decisions about the areas of research to engage in need to take into account both personal interests and the realities of the availability of the subjects necessary for your ideas.

It may often actually be the first step you take in determining the trajectory of your research plan. Begin by thinking about the potential availability of human subjects or samples and then based on the availability you can massage your overall interests in order for them to fit into the types of samples you have the ability of securing. It can often be very frustrating for faculty members who have great research questions and plans to then get stuck when they are trying to figure out where to actually find participants.

In order to be able to engage in a productive research program you will have to have specific information about how to access human subjects and the best practices in collecting data using human subjects. Having specific information and tips about where to access and how to navigate data collection with human subjects will go a long way in creating a productive research program which ultimately will lead to greater job satisfaction.

Using Undergraduates as Volunteer Research Assistants

A fourth area of focus that can be extremely beneficial in creating a productive research program is knowing how to utilize undergraduate students as a research assistant. This is particularly relevant for faculty members teaching in liberal arts colleges or other universities that have smaller graduate programs and many undergraduate students. The lack of graduate students with research assistantship or graduate assistantships does not mean that the entire burden of research has to lay on you. Undergraduate students can be an extremely valuable resource.

In fact, the research trajectory I have taken started with an area of inquiry that I embarked on as an undergraduate student. Considering that the program I was in during my undergraduate years did not have faculty members who were offering research opportunities for undergraduate students, I had to reach out to a different university in the area in order to be able to find a research mentor who was interested in an undergraduate student research assistant. My mentor was willing to integrate me into all aspects of her research work as a junior in college. I found this opportunity refreshing and I was able to devote a considerable amount of time during my third and fourth year of undergraduate education on this research. After graduation I did my graduate work at this institution and I continued working with my mentor throughout my masters and doctoral work. This is a great example of how the right type of undergraduate student can be extremely productive in research work. Knowing how to identify and train undergraduate students in your research work can offer an invaluable asset in your overall research agenda.

Having specific information and concrete ideas about how to engage undergraduate students in your research could go a long way in helping your research goals. This student involvement will ultimately offer you valuable work and will free up your time to focus on areas of research that only you could engage in and will also free up your time to being able to apply yourself to other job requirements. Knowing how to effectively work and utilize undergraduate students as research assistants will help in your research productivity, will minimize your workday stress, and will ultimately lead to greater job satisfaction.

Bureaucratic Stumbling Blocks

Finally, an area of information that can be very beneficial in your objectives is knowing how to deal with bureaucratic stumbling blocks common in university systems. Taking the time in learning, upfront, what can be done in navigating these issues will minimize the amount of time that is usually spent in trying to the deal with the stumbling blocks when they are faced. Furthermore, considering the research that highlights how some of these bureaucratic dynamics of universities are linked with job dissatisfaction and heightened stress (Gabbidon & Higgins, 2012), learning now how to navigate the stumbling blocks will lead to minimizing stress and elevating job satisfaction and productivity.

University faculties are notorious for having many members who are continuously disgruntled by the system. I have found that these individuals may have had great plans when they originally joined the faculty but as they began navigating the university system and some of the bureaucracy inherent in large educational institutions they slowly developed the bitterness that affected and infected all aspects of their work. Knowing ahead of time what to expect can minimize the likelihood of you turning out like one of those unhappy members of academia.

Book Overview

The upcoming chapters will be devoted to each of these five areas and will suggest specific ways to tackle the difficulties inherent in each of these five categories. The next five chapters will each tackle one of these five issues with specific tips, suggestions, and examples to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Getting Started and Overcoming Time Constraints
• 3 Obtaining Space and Equipment Resources
• 4 Finding Available Human Subjects
• 5 Recruiting Undergraduate Volunteer Researchers
• 6 Bureaucratic Odds and Ends
• Author Index
• Index