Below is a link to a survey from a sociologist who is researching the experiences of tenured/tenure-track faculty who have children born or adopted in the past 4 years. If you fit this category, you may not have 20-25 minutes to do the survey, especially if it cuts into your blog reading/writing time, but perhaps you will have sympathy for an academic trying to acquire as much data as possible.
Has anyone has done a survey that follows parents of young children further in their careers to see how being a parent affects one's career at various stages? I am being just a bit self-absorbed here, as the parent of a child about ten years older than the target of this survey, but although being a parent is in some ways less intense as the child gets older and more self-sufficient, except when she loses her cell phone for the 4th time in a year, there are other time-consuming parenting activities.
A recent topic of conversation among some of my colleagues with offspring who have recently started driving is how the stress of having their teenagers drive balances with the relief of no longer having to shuttle them to soccer practice, horse riding lessons, or even to and from school. In fact, as I write, I am waiting for my daughter near the site of one of her favorite Activities, an event that requires 4.5 hours, including driving. I can get some work done while she's Activating (and also read about how cats, unlike dogs, have an "instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces"), but it's still a lot of time, with even more devoted to transportation to/from Activities over the next three days. I am definitely both dreading and looking forward to her being able to drive in the not-too-distant future.
Anyway, for you academic parents who don't need to worry about driving offspring for 11-15 more years:
Faculty Parent Survey
Hello, I am currently conducting research on parenting in academia. I wish to survey mothers and fathers who had, or adopted, a child recently (2006 - present), AND were in a tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the time.
If you meet these criteria and would be interested in giving your perspective on issues about combining parenthood and professorship, I invite you to take an online survey that should take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete.
The link to the survey is: http://bit.ly/prof-parent-survey>http://bit.ly/prof-parent-survey
Sincerely,
Laurie Petty
Sociology Department
University of Kansas
lpetty@ku.edu