Abstract
ABSTRACTThe importance of academics undertaking research and publishing their research results is emphasised by universities. Engagement in research is recognised as an effective means to increase a university's profile. This study applied a qualitative approach to explore affordances, barriers, and motivations towards the engagement in research experienced by academics at one of the leading universities in Vietnam. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with academics whose academic rank, discipline, qualification, age, and gender are different. A thematic analysis of the data discovered four institutional factors hindering the engagement in research of academics: financial support for research activities (affordance); teaching load (barrier); research collaboration (motivation); and research policy settings and practices (motivation). The findings revealed that a majority of the respondents were aware of the importance of research but their research productivity is still low because of probl...
Highlights
The Higher Education (HE) sector has become more complex and multi-layered in past decades, with exponential growth in discipline knowledge and increasing pressure from society regarding research productivity of academics as knowledge contribution
Since 2005, Research-Oriented University (ROU) has been striving towards increasing the research productivity of its academics in order to transition to a research university status by 2020 as desired of the Government of Vietnam (GoV) and the global trend in HE
This paper has investigated the influences of institutional factors on the research productivity of academics at the ROU in Vietnam
Summary
The Higher Education (HE) sector has become more complex and multi-layered in past decades, with exponential growth in discipline knowledge and increasing pressure from society regarding research productivity of academics as knowledge contribution. It was noted that in the VHE sector, 9562 academics had a Doctoral degree and 39,002 held a Master’s degree (Bộ Giáo dục và Đào tạo, 2013) Despite such a large number of highly qualified academics, the research productivity of academics in Vietnam is deemed significantly low, when compared to academics in other Asian countries such as Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia because a majority of academics in Vietnam are teaching-focused (Hayden & Thiep, 2010; Thomson, 2012). Following the initiative of the HERA in 2005, the Prime Minister of Vietnam issued a decision number 145/2006/QĐ-TTg on the policy and main directions in the building of several international standard universities in Vietnam in which ROU is one of the selected universities to be developed to a research university (Thủ tướng Chính phủ, 2006) These policies were in place to support the transition of some key universities from teaching institutions to research institutions by 2020 despite most public universities still having financial constraints in the operation of supporting research activities of the institution in particular. Regarding the number of academics by qualification, only 229 staff (15.8%) obtained a doctoral degree while 842 people (56.87%) and 396 people (27.33%) obtained a master’s and bachelor degrees, respectively
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
