Faculty Attitudes and Interest in Conducting Research at a Teaching Institution—A View from an Evangelical Christian University

Abstract

Since the 1990s, there has been an increased expectation at “teaching institutions” that faculty engage in academic scholarship and empirical research activities. The present study explored faculty perceptions of undergraduate students as research partners and the factors that motivate faculty-driven scholarship at a Christian university that, until the mid-2000s, has been predominantly an undergraduate-serving college. In particular, the current research focused on the experiences of early, mid- and later-career faculty who have been charged with facilitating both undergraduate and, to a lesser extent, graduate students’ learning and emersion in the research enterprise. The study addressed 1) what factors influence faculty to include students in their work actively; 2) how faculty, with heavy teaching loads, organize their professional and scholarly lives incorporating research generally and student collaborations specifically, and 3) from the perspective of participating faculty, how campus factors both fiscal and institutional may hamper or support faculty efforts. Faculty in the allied health sciences endorsed more favorable attitudes than those in the natural sciences in humanities/liberal arts disciplines. Intrinsic factors such as peer recognition differed by both gender and academic discipline. Additional gender and discipline-associated differences were also detected in consideration of extrinsic factors. Differences in research and teaching orientation factors were observed, as were different experiences with funding success. Collectively, the faculty did not receive any discussions of research expectations during interviews. Last, a hierarchical regression model accounted for 62.3% of the variance in the faculty research motivation measure. The results are discussed in terms of the challenges associated with conducting research at universities with heavy teaching loads generally and, specifically, the issues that confront faculty employed at Christian institutions with research funding restrictions.