Communication Included in National Research Council
Survey of Doctoral Programs
By Linda L. Putnam, Chair, CCA Task Force on the NRC
Rationale for Participation
The field of Communication is one of sixteen new disciplines to be added to the upcoming National Research Council survey of doctoral education that is expected to begin in July 2006. The National Research Council (NRC) is affiliated with the National Academies, a prestigious federal agency linked to a number of important higher education associations. The NRC assesses the quality of research-doctorate programs and their faculties. The 1993 survey included 41 fields, 274 institutions, and 3,634 doctoral programs (Ostriker & Kuh, 2003). Communication was not one of the disciplines included in this previous study.
The 1993 study assessed doctoral programs using reputational measures, quantitative data on faculty publications, citation indicators, and information on student progress and outcomes. Administrators, prospective graduate students, faculty, and federal agencies have relied heavily on these data for a number of critical university and discipline-based decisions.
Including Communication in the next NRC study has a number of advantages for the field, including enhanced status and legitimacy for the discipline, access to contacts with federal and other agencies, and availability of data about Communication doctoral programs. Perhaps the most important advantage of being included in the NRC survey is that it enhances the status of the field. Participation in the NRC survey is limited to bona fide, research oriented disciplines, and inclusion increases the status and legitimacy of Communication. In the arena of higher education, the NRC has become the trademark or stamp of approval for a discipline. It signifies that a field has reached maturity in research and doctoral education. In the previous surveys, Communication was not rated, and not being included in the disciplines that are rated made it difficult for Communication to be treated like other fields. Inclusion in the NRC study also helps open doors to federal funding agencies, the Department of Education, congressional committees, and other policy groups.
Finally, the NRC study provides valuable information for the field–data on faculty accomplishments, student progress, and outcome measures–that are currently difficult to obtain. For these reasons, we celebrate being included in this important study and urge each doctoral program in Communication to participate in the upcoming survey.
Procedures for Conducting the Study
The NRC study is conducted through each university’s administrative system. A provost typically appoints an Institutional Coordinator, often from the Office of Graduate Studies, to oversee the university’s role in the study. It is important that each Department or college of Communication touch base with this administrator and inform him or her of your unit’s decision to participate in the study. A program must have produced at least five doctoral students in the past five years to be eligible to participate in the survey.
The NRC study includes four types of questionnaires: institutional, program, faculty, and admitted-to-candidacy students. The Institutional Survey, typically completed by someone in the graduate school, provides information on library resources, health care insurance, assistantships, and awards given to graduate students. The Program Questionnaire, typically completed by department chairs, graduate directors, or deans, collects information on faculty, departmental mission statements, number of doctoral students, and qualifications of students (some of these data require information over a five-year period). Faculty will receive two surveys—an initial questionnaire about their roles in supervising doctoral students and a reputational assessment of other programs in the field. Only a random sample of faculty at each university will receive the reputational survey. Only particular disciplines will receive the survey of doctoral students admitted to candidacy. We do not know yet if Communication will be one of these selected disciplines. Drafts of these surveys are available on the NRC web site at www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/index.html-What’s new.
In addition to the surveys, the NRC will collect quantitative information about faculty in each doctoral program and compute measures descriptive of departments, taking into account department size. These data include: the number of journal publications, federal grants, national awards and fellowships, and published books over the past five-year period. The NRC will use the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database to determine the number of publications and citation impact of published works for the faculty in a particular program. Book chapters may also be counted if they are included in ISI journal citations. NRC is currently exploring methods for measuring numbers of books published.
Results from the surveys will be made available on CD Rom. These will be distributed widely to universities, departments, and associations. The NRC Methodology Committee recommends that the results of the reputational surveys be reported in ranges rather than the previous method of providing numerical program rankings. Presenting the results as ranges should reduce misunderstanding of the data and allow the quantitative information about each program to be used to reveal factors that contribute to quality doctoral programs.
Role of the Council of Communication Associations
The Task Force’s role in the NRC process stems from the Council of Communication Associations’ (CCAs’) initiatives in 1999. This organization is an umbrella group of officers from seven communication associations (see www.councilcomm.org for a list of the associations). The Council was formed in 1995 to unite the various Communication associations in advancing Communication as a discipline. In September 2002, representatives of CCA made a presentation to the NRC Methodology Committee requesting that Communication be added to the next study of doctoral programs. CCA was successful. As a result of this meeting, the Methodology Committee added Communication to their taxonomy under the category of Social and Behavior Sciences. Moreover, CCA worked with the NRC to identify sub-fields of the Communication discipline, ones that will appear in the Faculty Survey in the form of a pull-down menu. On the survey, faculty members will identify themselves with one or more of the three designated sub-fields — Communication Studies, Mass Communication, and Speech and Rhetorical Studies (see www.councilcomm.org for definitions of these areas). These sub-field designations will be used to determine the specialty emphasis of each program and the relevance of faculty members to assess particular communication programs.
Activities of the CCA/NRC Task Force
In addition, the CCA has formed a Task Force made up of members from the various associations to oversee the field’s role in the NRC process. The CCA/NRC Task Force consists of Jan Dates, Howard University; Ed Fink, University of Maryland; Ted Glasser, Stanford University; Scott Poole, Texas A&M University; Chuck Salmon, Michigan State University; Charles Self, University of Oklahoma; and Linda Putnam, Texas A&M University, as chair of the committee. Bill Bathrop from University of North Carolina served on the Task Force during 2002-2004 and has recently resigned.
The Task Force has maintained regular contact with the NRC to receive updated information on the study of doctoral programs. In addition, this group has prepared a list of the doctoral institutions in our field, a comprehensive list of all communication journals, and a list of communication journals included in the ISI database (see www.councilcomm.org for these lists). The list of doctoral institutions is available on the NCA website at http://www.natcom.org/nca/Template2.asp?bid=351 (or by clicking the link on the left side of this page).
The Task Force has also prepared a working list of 190 journals in our field, of which 40% or 78, are included in the ISI database. From this list, the members of the Task Force have nominated 18 journals to undergo ISI evaluation for possible database inclusion. The committee plans to nominate an additional 15 journals by the summer of 2004. If any association members would like to support a particular journal for nomination, please send the name of the journal, a brief description of its mission, the editor’s name and contact information, and a brief statement on why it should be nominated, to Linda Putnam (lputnam@tamu.edu). If the CCA is missing any communication journals on this working list, please send us the name of this journal. Communication journals are those that have members of the field actively involved in the publication process and have a substantive focus on communication.
The CCA/NRC Task Force has also studied the ISI database and recommended that certain ISI-listed journals that were not currently listed under the classifications of “Communication” or “Film, Radio, and Television” be so included. We also requested that ISI change the category title of “Film, Radio, and Television” to “Film and Media Studies.” We have not heard from ISI about these recommendations, but we expect to get word about them this summer.
Finally, the members of the Task Force are disseminating information about the NRC study to the field. We have made presentations at the NCA, AEJMC, BEA, and ICA conferences, either on special panels, doctoral programs breakfasts, or meetings with deans of communication schools. We have sent letters to department chairs and graduate directors and prepared a list of e-mail addresses to aid with disseminating new developments about the study, as we acquire more information. Faculty members who want to learn more about the NRC study can obtain an important published report, Assessing Research-Doctorate Programs: A Methodology Study, by ordering it on-line for $31.50 from the National Academies (www7.nationalacademies.books.nap.edu/catalog/10859.html).
Guidelines for Preparing for the NRC Study
The Task Force is also providing guidelines to assist department chairs and deans in getting ready for the survey. Four specific guidelines are important. First, universities with one or more Ph.D. programs in communication should work with their campus institutional coordinators to decide whether they will be treated as one or multiple units. If they are multiple programs, they will need to request separate Program Questionnaires. The NRC is now encouraging universities with different departments or units in the same overall area of doctoral training to combine their data into one overall program (see p. 23 of Assessing Research-Doctorate Programs: A Methodology Study), unless the departments are very different and combining them makes no sense academically. If separate Ph.D. programs on a campus are combined, they must complete only one Program Questionnaire, develop a joint list of their faculty, and consolidate data on current and past graduate students. Faculty members need to indicate on their Program and Faculty Questionnaires that the name of their field is COMMUNICATION, even if the university has a different name for the department or the degree. If a university chooses to have multiple separate programs, the department or college must obtain separate Program Questionnaires for each unit and refer to their units as Communication I and Communication II, not by department or degree names.
The one area that is an exception to these guidelines is Film Studies. In the early stages of the Methodology Committee’s deliberations, Film Studies was listed with Communication. The NRC then decided to place Film Studies in the taxonomy of Arts and Humanities (as opposed to Social and Behavioral Sciences) as an Emerging Field. If your department has a number of faculty members and Ph.D. students involved in Film Studies, you should obtain a separate Program Questionnaire for this unit. Your NRC Institutional Coordinator or Dean/Vice Provost/Vice President of Graduate Studies will need to be involved in the decision to treat this unit as separate from the Communication program.
A second guideline refers to collecting information in advance of the study. Each department will need to collect information on current and past doctoral students, for example, median time to degree, employment outcomes, and financial aid over a five-year period. The list of information needed is included on the Program Questionnaire or on Table 4-1, p. 27-28 in Assessing Research-Doctorate Programs: A Methodology Study. Because programs must have such data readily available, it would be wise to begin this process early.
A third issue concerns preparing the list of faculty in each program. Department chairs and deans will list the names and e-mail addresses of the doctoral faculty in their program. The NRC urges departments to include only those faculty members who teach Ph.D. students or supervise dissertation work in Communication. Faculty who do not supervise dissertations or teach Ph.D. students in Communication should not be included in the study. Faculty members who have joint appointments or who supervise dissertations in more than one graduate program should list the multiple programs in which they conduct doctoral education. However, the data for a given faculty member (e.g., number of publications, citations, grants) will be pro rated among the participating departments to avoid double counting faculty output.
Finally, it should be noted that the NRC Study differs from the National Communication Association Survey of Doctoral Education. The NCA Survey, which will be distributed in fall 2004, includes reputational measures of doctoral programs, but it focuses on a different subset of the field. Moreover, it does not collect some of the measures or the specific information about doctoral students that the NRC assesses. Hence, we do not see these surveys or other surveys conducted by individual associations as duplicative or in conflict with each other.
Overall, the Task Force urges each of you to become familiar with the process and requirements of the NRC study. Even though the study is not projected to begin until summer/fall 2006, departments can collect information, educate faculty and graduate students, and get prepared for the study. The NRC urges department chairs and institutional coordinators to download the surveys off the NRC Web site and to conduct trial runs. Universities will have short lead times once the actual study begins. Being prepared makes your work easier and makes our field a leader in this important endeavor.
