Professional activities, institutional resources, and climate can all be seen as inputs in the lives of faculty members. It is useful to know how faculty members spend their time, what resources are available to them, and how well integrated they are into the lives of their departments, universities, and disciplines. These factors are, however, only important to the extent that they contribute positively or negatively to a faculty member’s ability to perform at the highest level in his or her teaching and research. Each of these factors may contribute directly to a faculty member’s performance, or they may contribute to professional satisfaction and quality of life, which may in turn mediate between professional activities, institutional resources, and climate on the one hand and professional accomplishments on the other.
Teaching performance or effectiveness has been assessed in a variety of ways. The most prevalent is teaching evaluations (either by students or by peers), which are frequently used as performance indicators in salary, tenure, and promotion decisions (as well as for hiring decisions). Another possible approach that is interesting in principle but difficult in practice is the assessment of what students have learned in a course or while doing a project. One could also ask where a faculty member’s graduate students land postdocs, faculty positions, or other employment. Unfortunately, this information was not gathered as part of our survey, and there are no national studies on these outcomes, with the exception of a number of studies on student evaluations of teaching. Some of those studies have looked at whether there are gender differences in the evaluations male and female faculty receive from students (Andersen and Miller, 1997; Centra and Gaubatz, 2000). However, a review of the literature suggests ambiguous results: “In many of these studies, male professors receive higher ratings than their female counterparts (Basow and Silberg, 1987; Kierstead et al., 1988; Sidanius and Crane, 1989). Others have female professors receiving higher evaluations than males (Tatro, 1995). Cashin’s (1995) review of the literature showed little to no difference. Feldman’s (1992, 1993) reviews found little to no difference in laboratory studies, while in observational studies, females had higher ratings in two-thirds of the cases” (Andersen and Miller, 1997:217). There could be a concern that women, who are particularly underrepresented in science and engineering, may be evaluated more harshly because they do not fit the perceived stereotypes of scientists or engineers.
In our survey, we asked about several important kinds of research performance or accomplishments. We asked respondents to tell us about their publications in the past 3 years, grant funding for their research, and how much lab space they had.
We also asked respondents to tell us about their salaries and whether they have been nominated for prizes or awards. Both salary and nominations for prizes or awards can be seen as indicators of the perceived quality of a faculty member’s teaching and research. Finally, we asked our respondents whether they had received an outside offer in the past 5 years. This can be seen as an indicator largely based on the faculty member’s research accomplishments.
We did not ask the respondents about their satisfaction with their professional lives. However, we do have data from the NSOPF:04, and we did ask our respondents whether they were thinking of leaving or retiring, which may be seen as an indirect measure of job satisfaction.