Organizational Identity and Community Values: Determining Meaning in Post-secondary Education Social Media Guideline and Policy Documents (open access)

Organizational Identity and Community Values: Determining Meaning in Post-secondary Education Social Media Guideline and Policy Documents

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. Social media platforms and applications have the potential to increase communication channels, support learning, enhance research, and encourage community engagement at PSE institutions. As social media implementation and administration has developed in PSE, there has been minimal assessment of the substance of social media guideline and policy documents. The first objective of this research study was to examine an accessible, online database (corpus) comprised of 24, 243 atomic social media guideline and policy text documents from 250 PSE institutions representing 10 countries to identify central attributes. To determine text meaning from topic extraction, a rotated latent semantic analysis (rLSA) method was applied. The second objective of this investigation was to determine if the distribution of topics analyze in the corpus differ by PSE institution geographic location. To analyze the diverging topics, the researcher utilized an iterative consensus-building algorithm.Through the maximum term frequencies, LSA determined a rotated 36-factor solution that identified common attributes and topics shared among the 24,243 social media guideline and policy atomic documents. …
Date: August 2014
Creator: Pasquini, Laura Anne
System: The UNT Digital Library
Tenured/tenure-track Faculty Diversity: Does Search Committee Training Make a Difference? (open access)

Tenured/tenure-track Faculty Diversity: Does Search Committee Training Make a Difference?

Diversity impacts organizations, both internally and externally. Responses to changes in demographics come from legal and moral imperatives. As a reflection of the changes in the population demographics in the United States, universities have seen and sought increased diversity in their student enrollment. Many institutions have purposeful plans to increase representation of under-represented groups as well as those students from low-income families. Some schools also recognize the importance of having diversity represented within their staff and faculty positions as a way of creating a supportive environment that also promotes diversity of thought. As schools increase the diversity of their student population, at what level are they increasing diversity among their tenured and tenure-track faculty? The purpose of this study is to examine the impact on full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty diversity compared to enrolled student diversity at institutions that promote, require, or provide access to training for faculty search committees, including diversity/cultural awareness, legal compliance, and process training, and those institutions that do not appear to have any training requirement as documented on their websites. Only tenured/tenure-track faculty were considered as they are the permanent teaching/research positions and generally represent the core faculty of every department at a university.
Date: August 2014
Creator: Philpot, Denise R.
System: The UNT Digital Library