THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELECTED PERSONAL, DEPARTMENTAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AND THE PUBLICATION PRODUCTIVITY OF ASIAN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY FACULTY (CHINESE AMERICAN, SCIENCE, ENGINEERING)

This study investigated the relationship between certain personal and departmental variables and the publishing activity of Asian American science and engineering faculty. Secondary analysis was performed on productivity data collected in the 1969 American Council on Education and Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (ACE-CCHE) Faculty Survey. Personal (interest in research, frequency of communication with other scientists, and academic journal subscriptions) and departmental (primary teaching responsibility and instructional workload) variables utilized in this study were those which had previously been identified as being good predictors of faculty publication output. A random sample of 111 Asian American professors teaching in the science and engineering disciplines, as well as a stratified random sample of similar white faculty selected to correspond to the Asian American group were derived from the one-third condensed sample of 20,008 respondents in the ACE-CCHE study. Items on the ACE-CCHE questionnaire dealing with faculty productivity were employed in this study, and chi square analysis determined if significant associations existed between selected personal and departmental variables and the publication activity of Asian American and white scholars. To observe whether or not the relationship between the determinants of Asian American scientific productivity identified in the ACE-CCHE continues to persist, a regional survey was carried out among 124 Chinese American science and engineering faculty employed at universities situated in the Northeast during the spring of 1983. A questionnaire was constructed and pilot tested before being used in the actual study. Because of the relative numerical rarity of Asian American professors teaching in predominantly white universities, Kanter\u27s (1977) proposition that the environmental variable, extra performance pressures related to one\u27s token status, may be associated with one\u27s professional achievement was also investigated. This study found that Asian American faculty employed at American postsecondary institutions generally had high publication levels. It was also determined that significant associations existed between research interest, frequency of communication with colleagues at other institutions, professional journal subscriptions, major teaching responsibility, and instructional workload and Asian American scholarly activity. In addition, it was found that, although greater performance pressures created by the token status of Asian American professors did not influence faculty research productivity, they were positively related to their teaching loads