Monica Gaughan

Job Satisfaction among University Faculty: Individual, Work, and Institutional Determinants

We find that faculty members are more satisfied with their jobs when they perceive that their colleagues respect their research work and they are paid what they are worth. Women tend to be less satisfied, and the tenured are more satisfied. Industry and university research center affiliations do not predict job satisfaction.

Faculty publication productivity, collaboration, and grants velocity: using curricula vitae to compare center-affiliated and unaffiliated scientists

We examine the effect of a Congressionally mandated multidisciplinary center program on the careers of affiliated scientists. Important to the research evaluation design, we incorporate a control group of researchers who are not affiliated with these centers. We collect curricula vitae from both groups, a data source that has been demonstrated to provide valid and reliable longitudinal data about academic productivity. We evaluate the impact of center affiliation on publication productivity, collaboration, and grants activity. We find that center affiliation tends to promote lower grant velocity, but greater levels of collaboration. These higher levels of collaboration increase publication productivity, but gains may be offset by the lower grants velocity. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

College Graduation Rates for Minority Students in a Selective Technical University: Will Participation in a Summer Bridge Program Contribute to Success?

There are many approaches to solving the problem of underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic groups and women in scientific and technical disciplines. Here, the authors evaluate the association of a summer bridge program with the graduation rate of underrepresented minority (URM) students at a selective technical university. They demonstrate that this 5-week program prior to the fall of the 1st year contains elements reported as vital for successful student retention. Using multivariable survival analysis, they show that for URM students entering as fall-semester freshmen, relative to their nonparticipating peers, participation in this accelerated summer bridge program is associated with higher likelihood of graduation. The longitudinal panel data include more than 2,200 URM students.

Using the curriculum vitae for policy research: an evaluation of National Institutes of Health center and training support on career trajectories

There has been enhanced attention to the mechanisms by which policy-makers support clinical research, with particular attention to establishing research centers and fostering the training of clinical researchers. The impact of these relatively new activities on the scholarly career is yet to be explored. In this work, I use the curriculum vitae to study the careers of clinical scientists. Prospective, unobtrusive, complete, and available, the CV contains such vital information as training, career timing and research characteristics. In this study, I focus on the coding of CVs in light of model development and analytic demands to demonstrate how to use the CV in multivariate survival analyses to study relevant policy outcomes. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Building Sustainable Community Partnerships Into the Structure of New Academic Public Health Schools and Programs

We describe and assess how the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia, established in 2005, has developed formal institutional mechanisms to facilitate community-university partnerships that serve the needs of communities and the university. The College developed these partnerships as part of its founding; therefore, the University of Georgia model may serve as an important model for other new public health programs. One important lesson is the need to develop financial and organizational mechanisms that ensure stability over time. Equally important is attention to how community needs can be addressed by faculty and students in academically appropriate ways. The integration of these 2 lessons ensures that the academic mission is fulfilled at the same time that community needs are addressed. Together, these lessons suggest that multiple formal strategies are warranted in the development of academically appropriate and sustainable university-community partnerships.

Ethnography, Demography and Service-Learning: Situating Lynwood Park

This paper reports the results of a one-year service-learning project that excited students about sociology, and created useful analytic tools for a modest-income African American community. In the course of deepening our understanding of one neighborhood — including collecting extant demographic data, conducting surveys and interviews, site visits, and simply “hanging out,” — it becomes possible to demonstrate how using formal demography and community ethnography together provide better understandings of the processes of social stratifi- cation, segregation, and gentrifi cation than would be possible using only one of the methodological orientations. The paper begins with an introduction to theoretical and didactic challenges, proceeds to describing Lynwood Park itself using insights derived from qualitative evidence, and then describes our eclectic means of investigating the community. The second half of the paper situates Lynwood Park demographically and ethnographically in terms of the larger Atlanta community, and then in increasingly smaller and more socially meaningful units. Once we focus the demographic lens as much as possible, we must again rely on qualitative information to probe the multiple meanings of Lynwood Park. The paper closes with recommendations about how the people of Lynwood Park can use the data, and suggests how these techniques can be implemented theoretically and practically in sociology as a whole.

Fear in Bureaucracy: Comparing Public and Private Sector Workers’ Expectations of Punishment

When employees fear punishment for taking initiative, organizations are likely to be less effective and, equally important, such fear extracts a human toll, often contributing to a variety of manifestations of unhappiness including diminished health. We focus on two different types of fears of punishment, fear of being punished for presenting new ideas and for bending organizational rules. Employing Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing data from 1,189 participants in the 2015 survey of National Administrative Studies Project Citizen, we test hypotheses about possible differences in fear of punishment according to sector (government vs. business), general risk propensity, views about coworkers, job clarity, gender, and whether respondents are members of an underrepresented racial or ethnic minority. Using nested robust regression models, we find that the two different types of fear of punishment are predicted by different variables. Sector has no bearing on fear of punishment for presenting new ideas but is a major predictor of differences in fear of bending the rules, with government employees being more fearful. While gender has no significant effects, being a racial minority is closely related to fear of presenting new ideas. Having a negative view of one’s fellow workers, particularly one’s supervisor, is associated with greater fear of punishment from both rule bending and presenting new ideas. Those with a clear organization mission and job clarity are less likely to be afraid of punishment for proposing innovative ideas but not necessarily for bending rules. We suggest that the results have implications for managerial practice and human resource reform.