Abstract
This study examines how personal research collaboration and advice networks of academic faculty in six fields of science and engineering affect three kinds of satisfaction: satisfaction with rewards; satisfaction with reputation of department and institution; and satisfaction with professional recognition and visibility of research. The study includes determinants found in the literature such as perceived influence on departmental decisions, departmental provision of resources, and perceptions of time spent on service and other controls. Using data collected from a national survey of academic faculty in six fields of science and engineering in Carnegie designated Research I universities, regression models test literature derived hypotheses. Findings show that the effects of network structure and resources on satisfaction depend on the kind of satisfaction studied. Non-network variables demonstrate associations with satisfaction that are generally expected from the literature. The paper provides evidence of the critical role that personal research collaboration and advice networks play for scientists’ satisfaction. It also raises important questions about the complex relationships between network structures and resources, and satisfaction. Conclusions present implications for university and departmental administrators.
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Notes
Of the 151 universities, two universities (Yeshiva University and Columbia Teachers College) were excluded because they did not grant doctoral degrees in the target fields. Names of scientists were collected from departmental websites of the 149 remaining universities and manually entered into a database. Fields entered included: first name, last name, rank, sex, department, institution, email address and postal address. Gender was determined through a combined analysis of first name and photograph. Rank was nearly always listed on the faculty page. When it was not, researchers queried the university directories to find the rank data. A total of 23,896 names were entered into the population database.
The survey used an ego‐centric network design to explore the respondents’ relationships with their collaborators and advice ties, not the global network of which individuals are members (Wasserman and Faust 1994). Ego-centric surveys collect information from the respondent (ego) about the other people (alters) with whom he or she is connected, about the relationships that exist between them, and the resources they receive from them (Burt and Minor 1983; Straits 2000; Marin 2004). Through the use of an ego-centric network design, this survey was able to obtain detailed information about the collaboration and advice ties that are not accessible through existing data such as bibliometrics.
Once the survey respondent provided names of collaborators and advice ties, Sawtooth Software® removed the duplicates automatically before piping them as rows in subsequent name interpreter questions. This only occurred when an individual was named in both collaboration and advice networks. While the existence of the individual tie in both networks was recorded permanently, duplicates were removed such that the respondent did not have to enter data twice for the name interpreter questions.
While we considered modeling the three types of satisfaction as a set of structural equations, we decided not to for two reasons. First, we do not have sufficient guidance from theory to justify linkage across the different types of satisfaction. Second, it would be difficult to identify variables that would identify the different equations. We therefore opted to estimate the three types of satisfaction in separate OLS equations.
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The data analyzed in this article were collected as part of an NSF funded study entitled “Women in Science and Engineering: Network Access, Participation, and Career Outcomes,” (Grant #REC-0529642).
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Welch, E.W., Jha, Y. Network and perceptual determinants of satisfaction among science and engineering faculty in US research universities. J Technol Transf 41, 290–328 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9393-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9393-z