Assessment of the Impact of Teaching Demands on Research Productivity Among Doctoral Nursing Program Faculty

This article reports the findings of a study that examined the research and scholarship productivity of doctorally prepared nursing faculty teaching and mentoring doctoral students and the conflicting demands on them to maintain programs of research and scholarship. The specific aims were to (a) examine the research productivity and scholarship of faculty members teaching in doctoral programs and mentoring doctoral students to examine the perceived effectiveness of existing institutional mechanisms to support scholarship, (b) explore institutional features and personal practices used by doctoral program faculty to develop and maintain research and scholarship productivity, and (c) analyze predictors of scholarship productivity. Data were collected via an on-line researcher-developed survey that examined doctoral faculty roles/responsibilities and their relationship to their scholarly productivity, overall research productivity, and institutional features and personal practices to support research/scholarship activities. Survey respondents reported spending a large amount of time engaged in research-related activities with 58.9% (n = 326) spending anywhere from 6 to 20 hours per week conducting research, writing research-based papers, giving presentations, grant writing, or conducting evidence-based improvement projects. Scholar productivity among the respondents was robust. Personal practices that most strongly supported faculty members' scholarship productivity were the belief that engaging in scholarship made them better teachers and the personal gratification in experiencing doctoral students' successes. A multiple regression analysis conducted to determine predictors of productivity indicated that the strongest predictor was the average number of hours spent on research/scholarship-related activities, followed by time bought out from teaching and other responsibilities of the faculty role for research.