Academic promotions at Harvard

I recently participated in a seminar on HBS Case Teaching at the Warwick Business School, which was run by Grier Palmer who is Assistant Dean, Teaching and Learning at the school. He had recently gone to Harvard for a short course and was sharing his experiences.

One of the interesting things he shared among others, was an insight into promotions of academics at Harvard.

In most Universities, the most important criteria for academic promotions are publications. I have had several academics telling me that the secret to success in an academic career all boils down to how many papers you have published in high ranking journals.

One academic even told me that it does not even matter if your teaching "sucks" as long as you have regular publications in top ranking journals. Apparently, in Harvard it is slightly different. The most important criteria is getting publications out but over there they are more interested in case studies. Not surprising as case studies are a major source of income for the Harvard Business School and the University ultimately.

Another criteria were the student evaluations (so if you suck, you are out) which I guess should be the case as people pay huge sums of money to get into business schools and expect to receive a good teaching and learning experience.

 Finally, another important criteria for academic promotions was based on linkages with alumni and businesses. That does really make business sense. In other words, you really have to be an all rounder if you want to rise in Harvard. No wonder they are at top - at least among business schools.

Sample size in Quantitative studies

Is your sample size sufficient for your quantitative analysis? This is a question that a lot of doctoral researchers ask. I guess it depends on the type of analysis used. My PhD research looked at blog readers and I used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to analyse my data. I used the following to justify my sample size.

• For factor analysis, according to Hair et al., (2010), a sample should preferably be more than 100 for factor analysis to proceed
• However,  according to Tabachnick and Fidell (2007 p. 613), it should be higher than 300 cases, the number that is considered “comfortable”.

If you are doing SEM:

• A ratio of ten responses per free parameters is required to obtain trustworthy estimates (Bentler and Chou, 1987).
• Others suggest a rule of thumb of ten subjects per item in scale development, is prudent (Flynn and Pearcy 2001).
• However, if data is found to violate multivariate normality assumptions, the number of respondents per estimated parameter increases to 15 (Bentler and Chou 1987; Hair, et al. 2006).

References:

BENTLER, P. M. & CHOU, C. P. (1987) Practical issues in structural modeling. Sociological Methods & Research, 16, 78.

FLYNN, L. & PEARCY, D. 2001. Four subtle sins in scale development: Some suggestions for strengthening the current paradigm. International Journal of Market Research  43: (4) 409-433.

HAIR, J. F., BLACK, W. C., BABIN, B. J. & ANDERSON, R. E. 2010. Multivariate Data Analysis: A Global Perspective, New Jersey, Pearson Prentice Hall.

TABACHNICK, B. G. & FIDELL, L. S. 2007. Using Multivariate Statistics (5th Ed.) New York, HarperCollins.

Passed my Viva

I finally passed my PhD viva with minor corrections last Thursday (4th of August, 2011). My external examiner was Prof Amanda Broderick, Professor of Marketing & Deputy Dean (Queens Campus) of Durham Business School while my internal examiner was Dr. Scott Dacko, Associate Professor of Marketing & Strategic. Warwick Business School - two of the nicest people.

The journey was hard was it was well worth it in the end.

Read my blog post about it on the PhD Life blog "My Viva – Light at the end of the tunnel".

On the Knowledge Centre website

Just found out that I am on the University of Warwick Knowledge Centre site. Check out my short video clip of an interview on blogging, which I have uploaded on YouTube.

Related link: "What type of blogger are you?" Quiz.

Non-normal data and SEM

There are a number of interesting discussions going on in the Doctorate Support Group on Facebook. One of the more recent discussion was started by one of the members who had normality issues with her data.

Normality is an issue because it is one of the basic assumptions required in order to carry out structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis (BYRNE, B. M. (2010) Structural equation modeling with AMOS: Basic concepts, application and programming, New York, Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group.).

Normality means that the distribution of the data is normally distributed with mean=0, standard deviation=1 and a symmetric bell shaped curve. Normally the Skewness and Kurtosis measures are checked:

• Skewness: value should be within the range ±1 for normal distribution.
• Kurtosis: Value should be within range ±3 for normal distribution.

So what happens when your data is non-normal?

You don't have to worry unless the departure from normality is very severe.

1. Several studies have shown that most data in social sciences has non-normal distribution.

Bentler, P.M., & Chou, C.-P. (1987). Practical issues in structural modeling. Sociological Methods & Research, 16, 78-117.

Barnes, J., Cote,J., Cudeck, R. and Malthouse, E. (2001). Checking Assumptions of Normality before Conducting Factor Analyses. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 10(1/2), pp. 79-81.

2. The ML estimator is considered relatively robust to violations of normality assumptions.

Diamantopoulos, A., Siguaw, J. & Siguaw, J. A. (2000). Introducing LISREL: A guide for the uninitiated, Sage Publications.
Bollen, K. A. (1989) Structural equations with latent variables, Wiley New York.

3. Monte-Carlo experiments found no major differences in terms of SEM analysis results using ML estimator on samples of different sizes and with different Kurtosis and Skewness levels.

Reinartz, W., Haenlein, M. & Henseler, J. (2009). An empirical comparison of the efficacy of covariance-based and variance-based SEM. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 26, 332-344.

4. Bootstrapping is increasingly being used to get around this issue.

Preacher, K. J. & Hayes, A. F. (2004). SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, p. 717.

5. Large sample size leads to reduction in the problem if multivariate non-normality.

Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J. & Anderson, R. E. (2010) Multivariate Data Analysis: A global perspective Upper Saddle River, NJ, Pearson Education Inc.

Note: Severely non-normal data would probably need another alternative approach.

Presentation on teaching with blogs

Finally put up the video of my Presentation on teaching with blogs on YouTube. The clip is quite long (1 hours 1 minute and 42 secs).

Does your first degree even matter?

I was going through the CVs of some eminent professors at the Warwick Business School and I was quite surprised when I found out that the first degree of a number of them was not business related. An excellent example is Peter Corvi who is the Associate Dean (Undergraduate Programme) and Professorial Teaching Fellow in Finance at WBS. Looking at his CV, I discovered that he has a BSc Mathematical Physics (Edinburgh), MASt Mathematics (Cambridge) and PhD Theoretical Physics (Edinburgh). And now he teaches Finance.

There are several other academics whose first degree were not business/ management related including engineering, agriculture, architecture and so on but they are all now teaching business and management related subjects in business schools.

I have a background in Forestry (BSc Forestry and MSc Forest Products) and I am now doing a PhD in Marketing looking at consumer attitudes towards blogs and sponsored posts on blogs. Like a lot of people, I was able to make this huge move only though my MBA. IN my MBA class, we had people from all educational backgrounds, including Islamic studies, engineering and even a medical doctor.

I am getting back in touch with a lot of my old University mates via Facebook and was not really surprised when I found out that many of them were now working and doing really well in fields other than Forestry or Horticulture all around the World including banking, insurance and consulting.

My previous educational background has not hampered me in moving to the field of Marketing in any way. In fact it has made my experience richer.

Presentation on teaching with blogs

This Wednesday, I delivered a presentation on 'Teaching with blogs' along with Peter Kirwan from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. This presentation was part of the Window on Teaching sessions at the University of Warwick.

While Peter talked about his experiences on teaching using blogs, I talked about increasing the interactivity of the blogs and integrating with social networks.

For more information and to watch a video of the presentation click this link 'Teaching With Blogs'.

Update:  My Powerpoint slides on Social Media

Academics start working with Wikipedia

With the aim of making Wikipedia more credible, I started the Credible Wikipedia page on Facebook some time back and even blogged about it on the PhD Life blog. Unfortunately, I haven't received the support that I imagined that I would get here in the UK or from my friends in Malaysia.

However, academics across the Atlantic are quite proactive and recently the Association for Psychological Science is urging their members to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative in order to "deploy the power of Wikipedia to represent scientific psychology as fully and as accurately as possible".

I foresee the beginning of something huge.

Welcome to Dilipmutum.com

This is where I note down my thoughts on my current research, marketing issues, social networking and other topics of interest.