The Design and Methods of the Comparative Study
The research project ‘The Changing Academic Profession’ was a collective effort of scholars from 19 countries (or more precisely from 18 countries and the ‘special administrative region’ of Hong Kong; for reason of simplification, we will refer to ‘countr
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The Design and Methods of the Comparative Study
2.1
Introduction
The research project ‘The Changing Academic Profession’ was a collective effort of scholars from 19 countries (or more precisely from 18 countries and the ‘special administrative region’ of Hong Kong; for reason of simplification, we will refer to ‘countries’ in the subsequent text). The participating scholars had to cope with a conflicting situation. On the one hand, they intended to undertake a joint questionnaire that required a high degree of consensus or at least a readiness for compromise in order to develop a largely identical questionnaire for all countries. On the other hand, they wanted to reflect the specific issues of the academic profession in their own country, and they had to do this among others, because they had to raise the necessary funds for the national component of the project within their own country. Therefore, this project required a substantial period of careful preparation where choices had to be made as regards the target group, the conceptual framework and the themes of the questionnaire as well as many operational issues, and additionally many decisions in these domains had to be added in the course of the project work. The conceptual and thematic choices have been discussed thoroughly in the introductory chapter. Therefore, only the key conceptual and thematic choices will be outlined in this chapter. It should be pointed out that an international project with decentralised responsibilities requires central coordination as regards the formulation of the joint questionnaire, the sampling and surveying approaches and eventually the creation of a joint data set. Therefore, the scholars involved in the CAP project established a methods commission chaired by Martin J. Finkelstein (Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA) and including Elizabeth Balbechevsky (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil), Hamish Coates (Australian Council for Educational Research, Australia), Tsukasa Daizen (Hiroshima University, Japan), Jesus Galaz-Fontez (Autonomous University of Baja-California, Mexico), Amy Metcalfe (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Michele Rostan (University of Pavia, Italy). The methods commission consulted all national teams repeatedly and eventually took the final U. Teichler et al., The Changing Academic Profession, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6155-1_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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The Design and Methods of the Comparative Study
decisions as regards all key issues of the formulation of the international master questionnaire, the setting for standards for the survey process and the rules for the establishment of the international data set. The establishment of the international data set was undertaken by a data team coordinated by Ulrich Teichler (International Centre for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel—INCHER-Kassel—in Germany).
2.2 2.2.1
The Target Group Countries
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