RAAAP Worldwide

Two members of the RAAAP Advisory Group, Jan Andersen and Susi Poli, together with Kristel Toom and Pamela Miller have written a book Research Management: Europe and Beyond – available now.  It is sure to be of interest to those interested in RAAAP.

“Research Management: Europe and Beyond addresses the myriad responsibilities related to research management and administration. The book incorporates narratives from those working in the field to provide insight into the profession. The book also offers a unique perspective on the topic by incorporating global perspectives to address the growing interdisciplinary nature of research collaboration.”

The RAAAP project gets a mention on the Fundermentals blog in the post on “The Highs of the Hybrid: Bridging the Researcher-Administrator Divide” by @frootle.  As a disclaimer I should mention that Frootle works in the same office as one of the RAAAP Co-PIs (Simon).  His post focuses on those who combine the role of research administrator and active researcher.  Of the 2,691 RAAAP responders, 100 reported as having a joint  research administrator and researchers (full time), and a further 10 holding that joint position on a part time basis. Overall it is not too common, just 4.1%; as compared to 78.7% reporting as solely research administrators, and a further 14.9% who combine research administration with another (non research) role.

The poster that we presented at the 59th Annual NCURA conference scooped the first prize!  We are humbled and honored to be recognized by our peers.  Our discussion group session was also well received and we received at lot of really useful feedback.

After months of data cleansing and checking, we can finally announce that the data from the RAAAP survey is ready for analysis.  We will be undertaking some analyses ourselves for presentations and papers before releasing the data later this year for others to use.  There are a total of 2,691 responses which we have divided into 15 separate datasets (each with a subset of the variables for all 2,691 responses) in order to preserve respondent anonymity, they can only be linked by AnalysisRegionOfEmployment.  The MainDataset has 268 variables (although some are computed from others so there are not that many independent variables).  There is also a CareerDataset with 12 variables on why people joined and stayed in the profession.  An EmployerDataset with 8 variables on the characteristics of respondents employers, and a further 12 datasets each with just two variables: AnalysisRegionOfEmployment and one of the free text responses.

At the 31st May Advisory Group meeting, it was reported and agreed that (apart from textual analysis they may result in some additional back coding) the data analysis has been completed.  Further work is still needed before the data sets can be shared with others, but it does mean that in the coming weeks we will be able to publish some basic frequency charts of some data, to give a flavour of what is to come.

Some draft data were also presented at the recent CARA (Winnipeg), SARIMA (Windhoek) and EARMA (Malta) conferences by various members of the Advisory Group, with an ARMA session scheduled at the UK conference next week (Liverpool).  The first major event with the final stable data set will be the NCURA conference (Washington DC) in August.

There have also been recent articles in the NCURA Magazine (XLIX No.3 p44-45) and Research Professional (login required).

Due to the huge response rate and incumbent data cleansing and analysis, a 12 month no-cost extension to the project has been granted.  We will now finish in January 2018.  During 2017 there will be various dissemination events (see Project) and articles, and the final datasets will be made available for others to conduct their own analyses in 2018.

A huge thank-you to the 2,691 people who responded to the survey – an amazing level of interest and support.  Of those responses 2,376 indicated their main association – this question was on the last page, so that is a good indication that those 88% of respondents completed (more or less) the whole survey.  We now have the (pleasant) headache of analyzing all that data to see what information we can glean.  But please do bear with us, it may take a while.  However we will be providing some initial draft analysis at #INORMS2016 (in Melbourne) on Thursday 15th September.