What are your feelings about teaching online courses?

What are your feelings about teaching online courses?  Has your department instituted them?  If so, why?

Cover from ASA Research Brief: Changes in Technology, Courses, and Resources

Some sociology faculty salaries edge up: New research brief

The ASA Department of Research has released its 2012-2013 analysis of salary trend data for the academic sociology profession and other social sciences. Among our findings: average annual faculty salary changes between Academic Year (AY) 2011/12 and AY 2012/13 show slow or no growth in salaries at public institutions, compared to private institutions.

FACULTY: What happened in the past academic year to salaries at your institution?  Why?

What Do Sociology Departments Do to Increase Students’ Social Capital?

The following table is taken from our latest research brief, Social Capital for Sociology Majors: Applied Activities and Peer Networks, which is based on our 2012 longitudinal study, Social Capital, Organizational Capital, and the Job Market for New Sociology Graduates.

This table summarizes the activities listed on six sociology departments’ websites that provided easily retrievable information on  activities beyond the classroom. We share this information to provide a sense of the substance behind the survey response of sociology department chairs that their departments provide “a great deal” of emphasis on application and peer networks, and to provide other departments with examples of how they might organize their own websites if they wish to promote these types of activities. Please click on the table to view it at full size.

Sample of Sociology Departments’ Websites Promoting Career Information

Pathways to Full Professorship: What Do the Data Tell Us About the Role of Gender?

Contrary to what we all hear and say anecdotally, women and men academics in some disciplines advance to full professor at the same rate. Data from the American Historical Association’s (AHA) 2010 Career Paths survey indicate that academic historians reach full professor in the same amount of average time, regardless of gender (Townsend 2013). The differences, however, were found in the different pathways that lead women and men to the upper ranks of academia.

Townsend attempted to explain this discrepancy by not only looking at the total time it took to advance, but also the number of years between each rank, how marriage and/or family and childcare issues affected promotion, amount of time spent on professional activities, amount of productivity, and other factors. Townsend found that married male historians in this sample were promoted faster than women who were married. And although women survey respondents reported spending more time on child and other family care than men reported, the amount of time they each spent on professional activities was the same. Although there was no direct comparison of the mothers and fathers in this sample, mothers moved through the ranks faster than women who did not have children. Data from an ASA survey of the 1996/97 cohort of sociologists support this notion (Spalter-Roth and Van Vooren 2012).

Is this true across disciplines?  A forthcoming study from ASA’s 2012 Time in Rank survey of full and associate professors in sociology will further explore this question, including whether there is a significant difference between the amount of time it takes men and women sociologists to advance to full professor. As we examine the data from the Time in Rank survey of sociologists, we will look at these and other factors to uncover the pathways men and women take to reach full professor and the different challenges they overcome in order to do that.

The ASA’s–as well as the AHA’s studies–are based on responses to questionnaires.  What would you add to such as study? Comment below and share your thoughts with us.

Will you use data from our 2012 Bachelor’s and Beyond survey for assessment purposes?

Are you using or going to use data from our 2012 Bachelor’s and Beyond survey for assessment purposes?  If so, how? For what other purposes do or will you use it?

Have you taken our 2012 census of academic sociology departments? We’re seeking critical feedback on your survey experience.

Since 1997, the Research Department of the American Sociological Association has conducted a census of U.S. academic sociology departments. The survey instrument has been designed to meet the information needs of those sociology departments, including demographic data about faculty, and types of courses offered. In June 2012, we launched our 2012 department survey and expect to complete the data collection process soon.

For those of you who already have completed the 2012 survey, we in the Research Department wish to know:

What aspects or sections of the survey were most challenging or time consuming for you to complete? Were there certain types of information that you were not able to obtain or obtain in their entirety?

• What aspects or sections of the survey were the simplest or least time consuming for you to complete?
• Did you delegate the gathering of information for this survey to departmental staff or other colleagues?
• Did completing this survey help you or your department faculty or staff in other ways (such as providing information to your administration)?

Please use this blog as a forum for discussing your experiences with taking this survey.  Your thoughts will be extraordinarily helpful when we interpret the survey results and when design our next census of academic sociology departments in the United States.

Help with Departmental Assessments

According to the most recent academic Department Survey, more than eight out of 10 sociology departments carry out departmental assessments that are often demanded by college or university administrators.  Faculty members have mixed feelings about doing such assessments, especially when they are ordered from the top down.

The ASA Research Department on the Discipline and the Profession has just added a new PowerPoint presentation—Program Assessment with Benchmarks: Using Data from the ASA—to our collection of free downloads.  The presentation describes how ASA resources—especially data collected from our Bachelor’s and Beyond Survey, can be used to “solve” common assessment problems.  These problems include the following:

• Lack of faculty time to work on assessment
• Lack of departmental consensus about what should be assessed
• Lack of student commitment to engage seriously in assessment activities
• Lack of comparative data
• Concern about reliance on “self reports”

The presentation provides examples of how these survey data can be used and how they can be enhanced through combining them with questions that test students’ conceptual and methodological knowledge.

An example of data on assessment activities.

Source: Spalter-Roth and Scelza, 2009. What’s Happening in Your Department with Assessment? Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.

We’d like to hear from you about the issues that you are having with doing assessments.  Also, are you adapting or have adapted the Bachelor’s and Beyond survey or other ASA data for your department’s assessment needs?  If so, how?  Was this effort successful? 

Job Market for New Sociology PhDs Is on the Upswing

Are you a recent doctoral degree recipient in the sociology profession? What has been your experience with seeking positions at the assistant or open rank level? Have you interviewed for academic sociology positions whose preferred expertise differs from your area(s) of study?  Do your experiences match our findings? Share your thoughts and stimulate a discussion with others in the field through our blog.

 

Findings

Results from ASA’s fourth job market survey suggest that the job market for recently-graduated sociology PhDs is improving, with the number of available jobs approaching pre-Great Recession years. In 2011, we saw a larger number of open specialties being advertised in the ASA Job Bank than in 2010, and almost 90 percent of advertised positions were for assistant or open rank professorships. The 2011-2012 Job Bank survey also quantified the top five most-frequent and least-frequent advertised areas of specialization in position advertisements, and enumerated the types of non-sociology academic departments that advertised for sociologists in 2011.

The findings from the 2011-2012 study are cause for cautious optimism among new sociology PhDs, though we note that the “overhang” of unplaced or under-placed sociology scholars resulting from the Great Recession (since 2008) is likely to create challenging conditions for recently-graduated PhDs in the field.

Outcomes for Women Minority Fellows Differ Strikingly from Male Counterparts

Data analyzed by the Research Department on ASA’s Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) show that women in the MFP are half as likely as their male counterparts in the program to be employed at research-extensive universities, half as likely to receive National Science Foundation and/or National Institutes of Health grants, about two-thirds as likely to become ASA section leaders, and have about half the amount of peer-reviewed journal publications as men in the MFP, since receiving their PhDs.

We speculate that Women in the MFP might be less encouraged to participate in normative academic activities than men in the MFP. For example, publications in grad school usually suggest that one will have a career of scholarly publishing ahead of him/her. Over three-quarters of MFP men had a least one publication prior to receiving their PhDs, compared to 38.1 percent of the MFP women. These differences will require further study. We welcome you to share your thoughts about these findings.

Gender and the Major: Should Anything be Done?

The data from ASA Research Department’s newest study of nearly 2,700 senior sociology majors have just come back from the field, and women represent the overwhelming majority. Three-quarters of the respondents who reported their gender are women, while one-quarter of respondents are men. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) support the claim that women comprise the majority of sociology undergraduates, showing that the percentage of women receiving sociology BA degrees has held steady at just about 70% since 1980 (see here).

Is this imbalance a problem for the discipline or not?  If yes, what can the discipline and/or individual departments do to recruit more male undergraduates?