A Major Challenge for Recreation, Parks and Tourism Education: An Importance Performance Analysis of Factors that Influence the Recruitment and Retention of Faculty

Abstract

Recruitment and retention of parks and recreation faculty has become a challenge in today's job market. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how faculty in recreation, parks, and tourism academic departments felt about their work environment through the use of an Importance-Performance analysis. Survey participants were Society of Parks and Recreation Educators members. Overall, academic departments/programs seem to be satisfactorily providing job attributes that are important to faculty members in both their decisions to join and remain with an academic department. Respondents deemed every job attribute as more important to the decision to remain with a department than it was in influencing a faculty member's initial decision to join a department. Further analysis explored differences between faculty members' with and without administrative duties, as well as those who work for Research Extensive/Intensive institutions and “Other” institutions as defined by the Carnegie Institute.