National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: Front Matter
Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 1994. Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1991 Profile. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9118.
×

INTRODUCTION

The following report presents information collected from the 1991 Survey of Humanities Doctorates. This survey is the tenth in a series initiated in 1973 by the National Research Council (NRC) in response to the needs of the federal government for demographic and employment information on individuals trained to the doctoral level. This series--called the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) project--originally included only doctoral scientists and engineers, but was expanded in 1977 to include humanities doctorates.1 The purpose of the SDR has been, since its inception, to generate estimates of the number of holders of research doctorates who reside in the United States and to characterize their employment patterns.

The sampling frame for the SDR is the Doctorate Records File (DRF), a census of all research doctorates earned in the United States since 1920.2 Estimates in this report are based on a sample of 8,894 humanities doctorates, drawn from a DRF population of 105,715. Data were collected through a self-administered mail questionnaire (see Appendix B for a copy of the survey materials), followed by telephone interviewing with a sample of about 60 percent of the individuals who did not respond to the mail survey. The mail survey was conducted between October 1991 and January 1992; telephone followup took place between March and July 1992. Appendix C discusses the survey methods and outcomes, including response rates, sampling and nonsampling error, and weighting procedures.

This report focuses on those doctorates who earned their degrees in a humanities field from a U.S. institution between January 1942 and June 1990 and were less than 76 years of age in 1991. Chapter 1 describes the size and composition of this population, including such characteristics as gender, racial/ethnic identification, age, and citizenship. Chapter 2 presents an employment profile of the humanities population in 1991 and includes data on employment status, type of employer, primary work activity, and median annual salary. For selected variables, data are presented to allow comparisons by gender or by years since award of doctorate. Chapter 3 presents characteristics of humanists employed in the academic sector (including 4-year colleges, universities, medical schools, and junior colleges).

Because of changes in the survey methodology in 1991, only limited time-series tables are included in this report (see Appendix D). These were produced by applying the 1991 changes to data from earlier years and limiting the 1991 data to mail responses only

1  

The doctoral degree categories that define the humanities include American history; “other history” (history and philosophy of science, European history, history of other countries, and unspecified history); art history; music; speech/theater; philosophy; English and American languages and literature; classical languages and literature; modern languages and literature; and “other humanities” (linguistics, archeology, American studies, religious studies, and unspecified other humanities).

2  

The DRF is maintained by the National Research Council under contract to the National Science Foundation.

Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 1994. Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1991 Profile. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9118.
×

in order to control for the effects of the higher response rate (mail and telephone combined). Readers are cautioned against making comparisons between data in this report and data presented in earlier Profile reports; only the indexed tables in Appendix D are valid for this purpose.

Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 1994. Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1991 Profile. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9118.
×
Page 1
Suggested Citation:"INTRODUCTION." National Research Council. 1994. Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1991 Profile. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9118.
×
Page 2
Next: THE DOCTORAL POPULATION IN THE HUMANITIES »
Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1991 Profile Get This Book
×
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!