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National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, 1988-2004
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The NSOPF:88/04 dataset contains data from a series of studies that form the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) program; public-use program data are available since 1988 at https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=011. NSOPF (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/nsopf/) is a cross-sectional survey that provides a national profile of postsecondary faculty and instructional staff: their professional backgrounds, responsibilities, workloads, salaries, benefits, and attitudes. The studies were conducted using self-administered web-based questionnaires and a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) of postsecondary faculty and instructional staff. Key statistics produced from NSOPF are counts of faculty, faculty hires and departures, tenure of faculty, tenure policies, retirement and other benefits of faculty, faculty characteristics, employment history, current employment status including rank and tenure, workload, courses taught, publications, job satisfaction and attitudes, career and retirement plans, and benefits and compensation.
Detailed Methodology
NSOPF:04 used a two-stage sample design, with a sample of 1,080 institutions selected for participation in the first stage, of which 1,070 were eligible and 890 provided a faculty list suitable for sampling. In the second stage, a total of 35,630 faculty were sampled from participating institutions. Of these, 34,330 were eligible. The institution frame was constructed from the Winter 2001–02 IPEDS data file. Institutions were partitioned into institutional strata based on institutional control, highest level of offering, and Carnegie classification. The sample of institutions was selected with probability proportional to size (PPS) based on the number of faculty and students at each institution. In the faculty-level stage of sampling, faculty were grouped into strata based on race/ethnicity, gender, and employment status. Furthermore, the faculty sample was implicitly stratified by academic field, which allowed for the oversampling of relatively small subpopulations (such as members of Black, Hispanic, and other ethnic/racial groups) in order to increase the precision of the estimates for these groups. The selection procedure allowed the sample sizes to vary across institutions, but minimized the variation in the weights within the staff-level strata: the sampling fractions for each sample institution were made proportional to the institution weight.
- Administrative records
- Survey (self- or interviewer-administered)