Análisis Segunda Actividad, Fase De Exploración

This section presents details of how I identified and selected interviewees. This is followed by the description of the respondents who filled and returned the questionnaires designed for this study.

4.3.3.1 Selection of the Participants for Interviews

This study follows non-probability sampling for conducting interviews and selected those participants who could provide important information about the research culture in the university. In selecting the sample, I chose the academic position of participants as a key measure. In addition, their research outputs were also considered because I needed to collect a variety of academics’ views in order to address the study’s research questions.

I collected information about the managers and academics of two selected faculties (Faculty E and Faculty F) from the latest available official directory of University X. The organisation of the information about total 115 academics in both faculties created a pool of prospective participants for the study. From this pool, I initially intended to select 22

participants (11 from each faculty) to include four participants from each cadre

also decided to include the deans of both faculties in the sample. To protect the identity of deans and chairpersons/ directors, I refer to them as managers. In choosing the academics, I ensured that at least one participant from each academic rank, who has been frequently engaged in the research activities in recent years (i.e. 2008-09), was included. The

academics’ profiles published on the official website and on the annual report of University X provided me a fair idea about their involvement in research activities in terms of total number of their journal articles published in various national and international journals. In this way, the diversity of the participants of this study was ensured.

During my fieldwork, I found only three, out of five, associate professors willing for interviews and one of them was also the head of a department. This situation was not

surprising for me because I could anticipate this problem and had a plan to overcome that situation. Consequently, I included two participants, a senior assistant professor and a senior lecturer, in the sample. Although, these participants were different in many respects from associate professors but, still, appeared to me a good alternative rather than reducing the sample size. As measure to protect the identity of the interviewees, I refer to lecturer and assistant professor as junior academics while remaining were refer as senior academic. A list of the participants who took part in this study as interviewees and their relevant information is summarised in Table 8.

Table 8: The interview sample and its relevant information

Serial No.

Pseudonym Academic Role Highest Qualification Total number of publications in Is any research paper published in/after 2008 ? National journals International journals

1 FA Junior Academic Masters 0 0 No 2 RA Junior Academic M. Phil 5 0 Yes 3 CA Junior Academic Masters 0 0 No 4 HA Junior Academic Masters 3 0 Yes 5 AA Junior Academic M. Phil 13 0 Yes 6 LA Junior Academic Masters 0 0 No 7 BA Junior Academic M. Phil 2 0 Yes 8 MA Junior Academic PhD 5 0 Yes

9 SA Junior Academic PhD 0 2 No

10 KA Junior Academic PhD 2 0 No 11 TA Senior academic PhD 14 4 Yes 12 ZA Senior academic PhD 13 6 Yes

13 DA Senior academic PhD 15 0 No

14 JA Senior academic PhD 30 0 No

15 UA Senior academic PhD 39 78 Yes 16 IA Senior academic PhD 32 2 Yes

17 BM *Manager PhD 21 29 Yes

18 CM Manager PhD 16 27 Yes

19 DM Manager Post Doc 15 12 Yes

20 EM Manager Post Doc 37 16 Yes

21 FM Manager PhD 33 6 Yes

22 GM Manager PhD 32 0 Yes

*Here the term manager stands for both the dean of a faulty and the head of a teaching department/centre/institution etc.

4.3.3.2 The Questionnaire Respondents

I was aware that the academics having managerial positions at University X had relatively busy schedule, therefore, I naturally thought that it might be difficult for them to spare time for both activities of data collection; interview and the filling of questionnaire. Therefore I decided to conduct their interviews only since interview was the main source of data for the study and I did not want to take any risk of reducing the chances for finding willing

academics for interview, particularly those who hold any formal managerial position as they were small in number.

Overall, I invited 103 academics from both faculties E and F to complete the

68 % response rate, which is quite overwhelming. The characteristics of the questionnaire respondents are summarised in Table 9. The table indicated that the number of female (59%) respondents was greater than their male counterparts. It was also noticed that the age of the majority of respondents was less than 45 years, which indicates that they were at an early or middle stage of their careers. This may further be supported by the fact that most (91 %) of the academics had junior academic ranks i.e. lecturer and assistant professor. Moreover, the data revealed that nearly three quarters of them had a research degree i.e. M. Phil (40%) and PhD (33%). Here, it may be important to recall that the academics with managerial positions (who were small in numbers) were not invited to complete the questionnaire owing to above discussed reason and all of them were senior academics i.e. professors or associate

professors.

Table 9: The questionnaire respondents

Background Variables Frequency Percentage Age Ranges 25-35 31 44 35-45 28 40 46-55 11 16 Gender Male 29 41 Female 41 59 Qualification Masters 19 27 M. Phil 28 40 PhD 23 33 Academic Rank Lecturer 38 54 Assistant Professor 26 37 Associate Professor 2 3 Professor 4 6 Total Sample 70 100