The Results of the Faculty Quality of Life Survey CSU recently administered a survey in order to assess the faculty’s workload, job satisfaction, and quality of life. What do the results mean for the university and the student body?
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n early Feb., CSU released the results of the Faculty Quality of Life Survey, which aimed to assess the “workload, job satisfaction, and quality of life information from CSU faculty with at least a 50% teaching workload.” Dr. Clinton Barineau, professor of geology, and Dr. Susan Hrach, professor of English and director of the faculty center for the enhancement of teaching and learning, conducted the survey via email and 283 unique CSU faculty members participated. “As an untenured assistant professor coming to the university, you’re very busy,” said Dr. Barineau. “You tend to look inward a lot. Stepping into the position of Chair [of the Earth & Space Sciences], I realized pretty quickly that my experience of working long hours and not getting a lot of sleep was actually not unique to me, that a lot of faculty experience that. I had this qualitative data, but I wonder[ed] if we can actually quantify this.” This question prompted Dr. Barineau to start conversations across the university, and this eventually led him to seek out Dr. Hrach. Barineau looked to work with Hrach as he valued both her thoughts and input, as well as her established position in the university. “It’s been an increasing expectation of faculty that we are engaging our students in hands-on activities and following the research on how learning works,” Hrach stated. “I told
6 | The Saber | SPRING 2020
Clint right away, I’m interested in this data as well, but because I want to fix something. It’s not just for the sake of complaining but to see where solutions might be possible.” Hrach and Barineau had seen similar surveys conducted at other institutions and modeled their methods after some of those. “One challenge of the survey is that it’s voluntary participation,” said Hrach. Because not everyone is required to respond, the results may not be representative of the demographics.
"I realized pretty quickly that my experience of working long hours and not getting a lot of sleep was actually not unique to me" The College of Letters and Sciences and the College of the Arts were overly represented in the data while the College of Education and Health Professions and the College of Business were underrepresented. “The results that came out of those colleges are actually not that different from what we got from the other two colleges; it’s just not necessarily as strong a representative
sample.” Another challenge was that convincing people to take part in this survey required a tremendous amount of trust that the results would remain anonymous. The researchers conducted the survey anonymously in two phases using SurveyMonkey, a popular surveying website. Phase I of the survey started on 15 Oct. 2018, and ended on 15 Apr. 2019, asking 10 questions about the faculty’s daily workload distribution, their perception of how their workload affected their quality of life, and how much control they felt like they had over their workload. Phase II of the survey included 27 questions and started on 15 Apr. 2019, and ended a month later. In order to implement this phase, Dr. Barneau utilized a random email generator and eventually settled on sending 27 questions to six random emails each day. Barneau aimed to send these emails every morning, including Christmas morning and New Years morning. Results from Phase I indicated that faculty worked approximately a mean total of 10 hours a day during the work week, seven of those hours being worked on-campus, and three of those while off-campus. On weekends, faculty worked a median total of 16.5 hours, accounting for a little less than 20% of their weekly workload. “The ‘work’ of ‘teaching’ makes demands that are qualitatively different from most other types of work,” responded Dr. Ramesh Rao, ASHLEY PETERSON & JESSICA DEMARCO-JACOBSON
