Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

Appendix

185 Appendix Basic Methodology The basic methodology used for studying sociologists was the methodology used for other disciplines. My basic strategy was to find a listing of the researchers in a given discipline. For sociologists, this was relatively easy since there is a directory of the members of the discipline’s national organization. The name of the directory is the AmericanSociologicalAssociation(ASA)2007DirectoryofMembers, and from it I developed a random list of faculty members. This listing does not include all sociologists, as some, like myself, are not current members of the ASA. But it is fair to argue that the vast majority of sociology professors are ASA members, and there is no reason to believe that using the directory created any sampling bias. I only selected sociologists who were listed as regular or emeriti members of the American Sociological Association. I did not include student members because I wanted to minimize the chance of selecting graduate students for my research. Each eligible sociologist was numbered in the directory. Then a list of random numbers was generated for a subset of 1,500 sociologists. The sociologist assigned to the selected number was included in the sample. If there were 186 || appendix duplicate numbers, if I accidentally assigned a number to someone who was not eligible for selection, or if I could not find an e-mail address for a respondent,1 then I generated more random numbers until I had enough respondents. After sending out e-mails, I found that some went to accounts that were no longer operative. In that case, I first checked to see if the e-mail address was correctly recorded. I determined the college or university the person worked at and then went to the department Web site of that educational institution. At times I found that the e-mail address in the directory was different than the address on the Web site, and so I replaced it with the address on the Web site. Every reasonable attempt was made to ensure that I used the originally selected respondent. But if all of these efforts failed, then I used the random number generator to locate a replacement. Only sociologists currently working in the United States were chosen, since I did not want to confound the findings with international cultural differences. Different social groups would have different meanings to scholars in other countries than they do for sociologists in the United States. For this reason, I eliminated all sociologists working at colleges and universities outside the United States.2 I sent the survey out twice. Each time I offered to share basic results with the respondents if they sent me an e-mail indicating interest. Since the respondents’ e-mail addresses were kept confidential , some of the respondents who filled out the survey the first time received it a second time. In my second e-mail, I apologized in advance for this possibility and assured each respondent that they would not receive a third mailing. I also set the online instrument so that a respondent could only send in one survey from a single computer, although a respondent could come back to finish a survey that was previously started. This reduced the possibility that individuals who received the second request would send in multiple surveys. Finally, it is worth noting that since I asked the respondents about where they worked, I was able to conduct research on only those that taught in an academic setting. Thus, the findings in chap- appendix || 187 ter 3 only represent the responses of sociologists who work in some capacity at a college or university. Including the responses of sociologists who do not work in the academy did not produce significantly different results, but since I wanted to investigate the production of scientific knowledge, I chose to eliminate noncampus sociologists from my analysis. In a similar manner, when I analyzed the data on non-sociologists, I also eliminated those who did not indicate that they worked at an educational institution. Information on Non-Sociology Disciplines I wish I could state that I chose different disciplines for highly academic and scholarly reasons. The plain fact is that the availability of a listing of academics from a given discipline was the major factor that shaped my choices. I did take into consideration the need to obtain information from disciplines in the social sciences, humanities , and physical sciences. I decided to select three...