Understanding Academic Science and Engineering: A Longitudinal Study of Research Groups

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This study is the first phase of a longitudinal study of organizational and contextual influences on academic research groups in U.S. science and engineering. The study will examine how research groups are organized and how they change over time; how contextual variables influence group structure, functioning, and performance; and how contextual and group variables together influence members' careers, work-related attitudes and values, and research behavior (including problem selection, research style, productivity, quality, and risk tolerance). The main purposes of Phase I are to operationalize major concepts and develop measures, field test data-gathering techniques, devise a sampling plan, design data management and analysis systems, and address and refine the research questions through analysis of preliminary data, This will be done through face-to-face interviews, questionnaires, and an examination of documents for approximately fifty-five researchers and their teams, drawn from a national sample of scientists and engineers in four fields. This project addresses fundamental questions about the social organization of academic research and thus should be of interest to a wide audience, including federal decision makers, scholars interested in the social organization of science, the community of researchers and practitioners concerned with higher education, and social scientists interested in groups, organizations, and work life. The immediate products of Phase I will be a detailed final report, an executive summary, and a one-page abstract of the project (25 copies of each) for NSF, and an academic paper (based on cross- sectional data) reporting on differences in group characteristics and performance among research teams.