Precarity in Academic Careers

Precarity, including short term research contracts, is a complex issue in academic careers. For this study we will develop an online survey asking early career researchers about their priority set when applying for their next role.We will also interview PIs regarding how they prioritise certain aspects of candidates when filling a position. This information will lead to a better understanding of the different solutions available for addressing questions of precarity or mitigating its worst impacts.

Participating in this study

This study will open in Spring 2024, starting with focus groups and moving on to distribution of a survey.

Link to expression of interest for this study: https://forms.office.com/e/GBs1Kpview

Study Overview

This project will test the potential for redeployment initiatives and short project extensions to mitigate precarity in research careers and understand the trade-offs necessary to allow this to happen. Through our research, we aim to get a better understanding of the perceived benefits of, and potential challenges arising from, contract extensions and redeployment schemes from the perspective of postdocs (those being hired) and PIs (those hiring). Our research follows a sequential exploratory mixed methods approach, where a qualitative phase is followed by a quantitative phase (Pluye & Hong, 2014). The qualitative phase of the project lays the groundwork for our quantitative empirical work which will confirm and generalise our findings and increases the scale of our research.

The OECD recently published a report on reducing precarity in research careers, suggesting that tackling precarity could ‘improve researchers’ well-being, develop more diverse, equitable and inclusive research systems, attract and retain the best talent in academia, and ultimately improve the quality of science’. We propose to test ways in which institutions might mitigate precarity. To do this we are drawing on the Russell Group ‘Research Culture and Environment Toolkit’ and current research policy discussion (see, for example, the ‘People and Teams UKRI Action Plan’ from March 2023, https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/UKRI-20032023-UKRI-people-and-teams-action-plan.pdf), which suggest offering a redeployment scheme and providing extension funds for postdocs at the end of a contract. We aim to empirically test the perceived trade-offs involved in redeployment and contract extensions to understand whether they have the desired effects and have the potential to mitigate precarity.

Given the specialised nature of postdoctoral researchers, redeployment brings several challenges, including matching the skills and interests of researchers in contracts that are ending to contracts that are starting. Contract extensions have the potential to increase the level of redeployment, either at the start (to allow training) or at the end (to provide a longer time window to identify an appropriate match to a new contract). However, providing contract extensions would represent a substantial and uncertain investment for an institution. This raises the question whether the benefits of redeployment and contract extensions justify these costs and how redeployment schemes can be designed to bring about the desired changes. 

At this point, the effectiveness and feasibility of redeployment and contract extensions have not undergone thorough empirical investigation. Our goal is to better understand which characteristics of redeployment and contract extensions increase researchers’ subjective level of job security, that is, their feeling and perception of job security, and the attractiveness of pursuing a research career. We also want to empirically quantify the relative importance of these characteristics, i.e., how researchers trade off between them. From existing UoC recruitment and HR data, we want to infer for whom redeployment is attractive and how feasible and successful the current redeployment framework is. 

Project Design

The project is divided into two phases: A qualitative exploratory phase, which also includes a pilot run of the main experiment, and a quantitative experimental phase, which will comprise the main part of the study (Discrete Choice Experiment, DCE). Here, we aim to identify key characteristics, or attributes, of redeployment which researchers deem important. We will mainly use qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews and discussions), supported by a quantitative approach to refine and confirm our qualitative findings (online surveys and analyses of UoC HR and recruitment data). Using these tools, our aim is to identify accurate labels and plausible levels for the attributes we will later use in the DCE, and test different implementations of the experimental design.

We will also use this qualitative exploratory phase to gain a better understanding of postdoctoral researchers’ needs, PIs’ experiences of redeployment within and outside UoC, and employment dynamics arising from redeployment. In the main experimental part of the project, based on our results from the qualitative phase, we will empirically test the relative importance of the identified redeployment characteristics in a larger scale DCE and/or a Maximum Differential experiment (MaxDiff) - see image below for a (mock) example of a question in this type of experiment.  

Your current contract is coming to an end and you've been offered the following positions. Among these, which do you rate best and which worst?