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Professors have more opportunities to misbehave

Posted by agbarnett on 28 Oct 2016 at 02:01 GMT

The misbehaviour items in Table 2 cover the past three years and the results show that full professors have higher scores than more junior researchers (Table 4). But full professors may have been involved in more studies and therefore had more opportunities to misbehave. They may actually be better or no different on a per study basis compared with more junior researchers. To estimate this you could adjust for the number of publications in the last three years. An alternative would be to ask about a recent number of studies rather than a recent time.

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RE: Professors have more opportunities to misbehave

jtijdink replied to agbarnett on 29 Oct 2016 at 21:50 GMT

Dear AG Barnett,

Thank you for your comment. I think you are right that the timeframe used and the questions formulated are arbitrary. We tried to stay close to other landmark surveys in the past to have more room to compare the results with other countries.
Furthermore, comparison between professors and PhD students is in other aspects also a bit ambiguous; a professor has different tasks in the research process than a PhD and thus have other opportunities to misbehave. ie. In the Netherlands, it is less likely that full professors are involved in data analysis. This gives them less opportunities to misbehave in that process and makes comperison also problematic.

Thank you for raising this important limitation. I hope this is an answer to your comment.

Best regards,

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