AIR Survey Fact: IR Office Maturity and Task Hierarchy
Fred Volkwein (volkwein@psu.edu), Jim Woodell (jkw168@psu.edu) and Ying Liu (yxl226@psu.edu), Pennsylvania State University

In this feature, Fred Volkwein, Jim Woodell and Ying Liu of Pennsylvania State University share selected findings from the AIR survey of IR, Assessment and Planning offices they conducted in 2008. The editors thank Fred and his colleagues for this contribution. Comments and questions about this feature are welcome and may be addressed to Fred at volkwein@psu.edu.

AIR Survey Fact

This month, we continue our analysis of the tasks and work activities of IR offices by exploring the relationship between the maturity of the campus IR operation and the analytical complexity of the activities conducted by that office.

As described in the March “Survey Fact” we developed an inventory of 77 analytical responsibilities and built them into a survey response scale. We asked offices to indicate whether each separate responsibility is conducted or not in IR, and whether it is shared with some other office or offices. Moreover, we evaluated each activity as high, medium, or low in terms of its analytical complexity and skill. We gave a high rating to those IR activities requiring high levels of educational preparation and analytical skill (e.g., enrollment projection models, multivariate outcomes studies, peer benchmarking). On the other hand, we gave a low rating to each activity requiring less training and skill (e.g., maintaining/producing the campus factbook, responding to guidebooks and federal/state data requests, reporting student characteristics, enrollments, and degrees awarded). Based upon the sum of these high, medium, and low ratings, we created a “Task Hierarchy” score for each IR office.

To what extent are these Task Hierarchy scores related to the maturity of the campus IR operation? In earlier Volkwein studies (1999, 2008), we developed an ecology of IR offices based upon their staff size, years of experience, and degree preparation. We expect that the larger and more experienced the IR staff, and the higher the level of degree preparation, the more developed and elaborate will be the institutional research and planning function on the campus. Thus, in the current analysis, we sought to examine these and other IR office and institutional characteristics for evidence of such maturity.

The results confirm our expectations (see Figure 1). The task hierarchy scores are the most strongly associated with a variable that we call “IR maturity” – a combination of IR staff size, years of experience, and highest level of degree preparation. Separately, each of these three variables is more strongly associated with the various Task Hierarchy measures than other variables in the study like institution type, institution size, Carnegie Classification, and office titles. Together these three variables account for important office-to-office differences in the Task Hierarchy scores, as shown in Figure 1. In every area of IR activity, the offices rated low on IR maturity have lower task scores than the offices rated medium or high.

References:

Volkwein, J. Fredericks (1999). What is Institutional Research All About: A Critical and Comprehensive Assessment of the Profession. New Directions for Institutional Research (Number 104). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Volkwein, J. Fredericks (2008). The Foundations and Evolution of Institutional Research. Chapter 1 in Institutional Research: More than Just Data (Dawn Terkla, Editor). New Directions for Higher Education (Number 141). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 5-20.