Conceptions of ‘research’ and their gendered impact on research activity: a UK case study

ABSTRACT

The last twenty years have seen an increased emphasis around the world on the quality and quantity of research in response to national research assessments, international league tables, and changes in government funding. The prevailing attitude in higher education embeds research as the ‘gold standard’ in the context of academic activity. However, a key feature of this trend is significant gender differences in research activity. We argue that research productivity is related to identification as a researcher, and that identifying as ‘research-active’ or not would appear to depend upon how an individual academic subjectively defines ‘research’. This article brings together two hitherto separate bodies of work (1) the impact of gender on academic research careers, and (2) academic conceptions of research. Through a combination of interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, we investigate the extent to which interpretations of ‘research’ and ‘research activity’ differ by gender within an institution in the UK and the potential impact of these interpretations. Although the research found that there are many similarities in the interpretations of ‘research activity’ between genders, we found one important difference between male and female participants’ conceptions of research and its relationship to teaching. Significantly, our findings suggest that there is a need to expand our existing conceptualisations of ‘research’ to include ‘research as scholarship’ in order to address the obstacles that current understandings of ‘research’ have placed on some academics. Self-definition as a researcher underlies research activity. A narrow conception of ‘research’ may prevent individuals from identifying as ‘research-active’ and therefore engaging with research.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• research activity
• conceptions of research
• research assessment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the research participants who kindly gave up their time to partake in this research. We also acknowledge the work of Anthony Cliffe and the Project Steering Group who collectively developed and enhanced this research. Finally, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable and developmental feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ruth L. Healey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6872-4900

Chantal Davies http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0532-7366

Notes

1 The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was the UK national research assessment mechanism between 1986 and 2008 before being replaced by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Research and Knowledge Transfer Office at the University of Chester.