In this section we try to paint a picture of the kinds of activities faculty report undertaking and the extent of these connections. We discuss the results of our survey, supplemented with insights from our case studies. The survey provides us with an indication of whether faculty carry out a range of connecting activities and the frequency with which they occur. The case studies give us some concrete examples of faculty linkages to the labor market and their local communities. The purpose here is largely descriptive; analysis of the findings is undertaken in the next section.
Complete survey results from these items are presented initially in Tables 5, 6, and 7, which show the means and standard deviations of various measures of connectivity for different types of faculty. (Appendix Tables 1 and 2 in Appendix A contain frequencies for all faculty.) The table items are grouped according to how they appeared on the survey. We discuss our findings on connectivity according to each of the four domains of linkages identified earlier, but present the survey results in tabular format by question (i.e., mixing domains) because we used different scales for each survey question. Different scales were used because we determined that we would obtain more precise information on some labor market connectivity items; pilot tests of a draft survey led to refinements of the scales associated with each item.
To aid the reader in interpreting the tables, we indicate for each row of each table the linkage domain that the item is attempting to measure: curriculum and pedagogy (CP), career assistance (CA), professional and community activities (PR), and institutional activities (IN). There are 9 CP items, 8 CA items, 4 IN items, and 2 PR items. Since we expect responses to differ by faculty type, we show means for all faculty and by full-time/part-time status and primary teaching field (academic or vocational). In general, differences between these groups are statistically significant, and the importance of these factors was confirmed by multivariate analyses, as will be discussed further in the next section.
Table 5 shows the responses of faculty to the question, "Approximately how many times did you engage in each of the following activities during the 1994-1995 academic year?" The response scale was "0 times" = 1, "1-5 times" = 2, "6-10 times" = 3, "11-20 times" = 4, and "more than 20 times" = 5. Table 6 reports the responses to a similar question, also on a five-point scale but where "never" = 1, "sometimes" = 3 and "often" = 5.
Table 7 also focuses on labor market connectivity measures. Faculty were asked whether they had engaged in a list of activities and, if they did, whether they had "received institution support." The table reports, for all faculty and by type of faculty, the proportion of faculty doing the activity listed, and the overall proportion receiving support. For example, item a should be interpreted as saying that 49.0% of all faculty "asked an employer about the skills desired in new hires" and 25.4% of all faculty received some help with this activity (the equivalent of 51.9% of those who had engaged in this activity). The "support" responses are discussed in the following chapter.