The COACHE Survey offers institutions three different modules based on faculty tenure status.
If you are a tenure-track faculty member, the COACHE Survey will differ from most others you get because it focuses specifically on tenure-track faculty. An important purpose of COACHE is to learn what tenure-track faculty have to say. Our experiences and studies indicate that neither the concerns nor the opportunities to express them candidly are the same for junior and senior faculty. In a broader survey, the voice of junior faculty will be lost, and institutions will be no better informed to improve the quality of work/life for the next generation of scholars. COACHE designed the tenure-track module through a process that included extensive research, discussions with focus groups, and pilot studies at numerous and varied colleges and universities. The result is a survey "by junior faculty, for junior faculty," in which every question is designed to produce an actionable policy response.
If you are a tenured faculty member, your COACHE Survey is a direct outcome of COACHE's work with pre-tenure faculty. After years of studying the experiences of pre-tenure faculty, we determined that the relationships and perceptions of tenured faculty are a central component of pre-tenured faculty satisfaction. However, the experiences of tenured faculty are quite different from their counterparts. So, rather than simply revising the tenure-track faculty module, COACHE went through the same rigorous process of reviewing the literature, conducting focus groups, administering extensive cognitive interviews and piloting the instrument. As with the pre-tenure module, the module for tenured faculty is a product of dialogue with faculty about what matters and what institutions can do to improve the quality of their professional life.
Institutions continue to rely on non-tenure-track faculty for a host of responsibilities. As the number of non-tenure-track faculty grow, COACHE hopes to remain on the leading edge of faculty issues. With this in mind, COACHE has developed a module for non-tenure-track faculty that combines some of the questions asked of tenure-track and tenured faculty with others specific to non-tenure-track faculty.
