Date of Award
2002
Document Type
Practicum
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Programs for Higher Education
Advisor
Marion Gibney
Keywords
faculty attitudes, faculty development, higher education, inferential statistics, job satisfaction, part-time faculty, professional development, survey research, t-tests, workplace satisfaction
Abstract
The problem under investigation was to determine if the perceived loss of job satisfaction by the part-time faculty was an accurate assessment of the situation. The purpose of this study was to use inferential statistics to compare the level of job satisfaction of part-time faculty to fulltime faculty currently teaching at the college. The research question to be answered was, "Are the perceived levels of job satisfaction of the part- time faculty equal to the perceived levels of job satisfaction of full-time faculty?" Validation followed these procedures. First, a review of the literature was conducted to discover research relevant to job satisfaction, faculty attitudes, part-time faculty impact in higher education and survey research. Second, a survey instrument was selected whose results contained the raw data for making the statistical analysis. Third, the question regarding job satisfaction was selected from survey instrument. Fourth, the researcher met with the Director of Research to insure data correctness. Fifth, using inferential statistics t-test a data comparison was made between part-time and full-time faculty.
The t statistic demonstrated that there was no significance difference between the job satisfaction levels of part-time and full-time faculty. There were 98 degrees of freedom. The mean for the full-time faculty was 3.016 and 3.073 for part-time faculty. The standard deviation for full-time faculty was 0.812 and 0.711 for part-time faculty. The critical value for a one tailed t was 1.660. The calculated t was -0.354.
Recommendations of this study included sharing the results with all faculty and a recommendation to include part-time faculty in college training and planning seminars.