The Mapping Project
Case Study Selection and Description
12/20/2002

For the Mapping Project, we undertook two types of case studies.  First, we selected 10 institutions from the overall sample for case studies with administrator interviews, interviews with the department chairs or heads in the departments of Chemistry and English, and focus groups of faculty parents.  In addition, two large universities were selected for the shadowing exercise, along with the three relevant interviews (focus groups were not administered at these institutions).  The latter institutions were selected to obtain a reasonable number of faculty parent respondents from within the departments of Chemistry and English, a task that we would be unlikely to accomplish at smaller schools.  The two universities selected for the shadowing exercise therefore represented a convenience sample.

Of the 10 institutions selected for case studies with focus groups, nine were chosen randomly from the list of 507 institutions where responses were obtained for the National Survey of Faculty.  One additional institution was selected at random from the list of 195 institutions where email addresses could not be obtained.  We were concerned that if we ignored such schools, the results would be skewed, perhaps because schools that provide on-line email directories have greater resources than those that do not.

Table 1 below describes the sample of schools in the survey sample, with many of the figures drawn from the National Survey (see SURVEY).  Most of the figures have an intuitive interpretation, such as the proportion of women on the faculty at each school, faculty age, parental, tenure, part-time, and U.S.-born status.  The last four items require some explanation.  The organizational work-family culture scale takes the average across faculty at each institution from a 3-item scale for the climate supporting work-family issues, such that a higher figure represents greater support (alpha=.818).  The supervisor support scale is similarly from a 9-item scale for whether the immediate supervisor (typically the department chair) supports the work and family commitments of faculty (alpha=.876).  The item regarding whether over half of women report bias avoidance is drawn from the sum of responses to 12 survey questions regarding specific behaviors designed to hide or minimize family commitments to avoid experiencing bias against caregiving (see Drago et al 2002).  Where over one-half of women at a school reported such behavior, the figure is positive.  Similarly for men, if over half of the respondents at a school claimed to have engaged in bias avoidance behavior, the figure is positive.  At just under three-quarters of the institutions, over half of the women respondents reported bias, and men reported in similar numbers at just over one-half of the institutions.

Most of these figures are similar to those reported in Table 1 of the Preliminary Results from the faculty survey. The reason for some divergence (e.g., average enrollment is much smaller here) is that the preliminary results weighted each respondent equally, while the results reported here weight each school equally.

 Table 1: Average Characteristics of Institutions in Survey Sample

*Summary from responses to National Survey of Faculty, all schools weighted equally.

Tables 2 and 3 report the average characteristics of the 11 institutions where reports from the National Survey were available.  Case study institutions 1-9 involved the focus groups, while Case study institutions 10 and 11 were used for the shadowing exercise.  The schools indeed exhibit a wide variety of characteristics with, for example, the proportion of women respondents ranging from a low of zero in Case Study 6, to a high of .58 in Case Study 4, an average age ranging from 39 in Case Study 6 to 59 for Case Study 5, and the proportion of parent respondents ranging from .52 to 1.  Four of the eleven schools are private, with enrollment ranging from a few thousand to over 40,000 (for the shadowing institutions), and with representation from five of the Carnegie categories (Associate of Arts and Technical Specialty schools are not covered).    In eight of the 10 schools where women responded, over half reported some bias avoidance behavior, while over half of the men responding in four of 11 schools reported bias avoidance.

Recall that a 10th school was added for the interviews and focus groups from the list of institutions where email addresses could not be obtained.  That school was private, fell into the Masters category for the Carnegie classification, and had an enrollment of between 4,000 and 8,000 students.

These figures will later be matched up with results of the case study interviews, focus groups, and shadowing, to identify broad and specific patterns of behavior according to institutional characteristics.

Table 2: Characteristics of Five Case Study Institutions

Table 3: Characteristics of Other Six Case Study Institutions

References

Drago, Robert, Carol Colbeck, Amy Varner, Kurt Burkum, Jennifer Fazioli, Gabriela Guzman, and Dawn Stauffer. "The Avoidance of Bias Against Caregiving: The Case of Academic Faculty," Working Paper, Dept. of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations, Penn State University, December 2002.