Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION IN EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY-EPOD, cilt.6, sa.2, ss.279-292, 2015 (ESCI)
In this study, the significance level of research assistants' professional problems was measured with the paired comparison method within the scope of "law of comparative judgment". In this context, research assistants' professional problems are investigated for gender, educational background and type of position. This study was carried out in the form of general survey model. The study group consisted of 555 research assistants working in public or foundation universities which are accredited by the Council of Higher Education in Turkey. The data collection tool is composed of two parts. The first parts asks for demographic information about gender, educational background and type of position while the second part inquires about the 8 professional problems (being directed to non-academic duties, lack of physical equipment, mobbing, foreign language proficiency, lack of guaranteed positions, financial problems, insufficient funds and heavy faculty works) given by the administration. The data was scaled via the third conditional equation on the full data matrix of Thurstone's law of comparative judgment. The results of the study indicated that the most significant problem research assistants face was economic problems. They were followed by mobbing, faculty workload, insufficient funding, job security, non-academic duties, physical deficiencies and poor foreign language skills respectively. When the research assistants' problems were analyzed in terms of gender variable, there was a meaningful difference in the scale values of mobbing. In fact, male research assistants puts mobbing in the sixth place while female research assistants regard it as the most important problem. Another variable is the educational background, it can be seen from the results that the most significant problem of those who have obtained their PhD degrees is lack of guaranteed positions. When research assistants' problems were examined in terms of type of position, it was found that lack of guaranteed positions is the most important problem for research assistants of 50/d position.