Search

This report delves into the challenges faced by early-career researchers in the fields of biology, chemistry, electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, and physics, with a specific focus on gender disparities and barriers to career advancement. The study aims to explore the experiences, perceptions, and support mechanisms available to early-career researchers, particularly focusing on the intersection of gender and career progression. The research methodology employed in this study includes semi-structured interviews with both early-career researchers and supervisors, conducted between July 2021 and December 2022. A total of 68 interviews were conducted with individuals from academic institutions, research organizations, and industry settings across Germany. The data collected through these interviews provided valuable insights into the challenges faced by early-career researchers, the support structures available to them, and the gender-specific barriers that impact their career trajectories. Key findings from the study reveal significant disparities in the support provided to this group, with structural barriers such as high rates of temporary employment and limited permanent positions hindering career progression. Gender biases and discriminatory practices were also identified as pervasive issues, contributing to the underrepresentation of women in academic and research roles. Additionally, challenges related to work–life balance and the lack of opportunities for career advancement beyond traditional academic paths were highlighted as key concerns. In response to these findings, the study puts forth a series of actionable recommendations aimed at promoting gender equality, enhancing support structures for early-career researchers, and fostering a more inclusive and equitable research environment. These recommendations include: • Providing targeted support and personalized mentorship programs for women and underrepresented groups in researc

Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members’ activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team’s research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research.

Socially negotiated orders of interaction essentially determine the flow of social situations. In reviews with on-site audits, different social situations exist, which in sum contribute to the production of formally correct and justifiable decisions. But how are the interactions shaped when review procedures are transferred to virtuality? What are the consequences for the review process? Using qualitative interviews, the significance of social situations and their inherent orders of interaction for those involved in peer review in both the present and virtual formats is investigated based on two funding programs of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The results show that virtual meetings limit the possibilities for interaction among all participants. In particular, it is problematic that situations with a situationally regulated interaction order are missing, because according to the participants, they are essential for review processes to run smoothly and in such a way that all relevant aspects can be included., Sozial ausgehandelte Interaktionsordnungen bestimmen wesentlich den Ablauf sozialer Situationen. Bei Begutachtungen mit Vor-Ort-Begehungen existieren unterschiedliche soziale Situationen, welche in ihrer Gesamtheit dazu beitragen, formal korrekte und vertretbare Entscheidungen zu produzieren. Doch wie gestalten sich die Interaktionen, wenn Begutachtungsverfahren in die Virtualität überführt werden? Welche Folgen ergeben sich für den Begutachtungsprozess? Anhand von qualitativen Leitfadeninterviews wird die Bedeutung der sozialen Situationen und der ihnen inhärenten Interaktionsordnungen für die Beteiligten von Begutachtungen im präsenten sowie im virtuellen Format anhand zweier Förderprogramme der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass virtuelle Sitzungen die Interaktionsmöglichkeiten unter allen Beteiligten einschränken. Problematisch ist im Besonderen, dass Situationen mit einer situativ geregelten Interaktionsordnung fehlen, denn laut der Beteiligten sind sie essentiell dafür, dass Begutachtungsprozesse reibungslos und so ablaufen, dass alle relevanten Aspekte einbezogen werden können.

Peer review has developed over time to become the established procedure for assessing and assuring the scientific quality of research. Nevertheless, the procedure has also been variously criticized as conservative, biased, and unfair, among other things. Do scientists regard all these flaws as equally problematic? Do they have the same opinions on which problems are so serious that other selection procedures ought to be considered? The answers to these questions hints at what should be modified in peer review processes as a priority objective. The authors of this paper use survey data to examine how members of the scientific community weight different shortcomings of peer review processes. Which of those processes’ problems do they consider less relevant? Which problems, on the other hand, do they judge to be beyond remedy? Our investigation shows that certain defects of peer review processes are indeed deemed irreparable: (1) legitimate quandaries in the process of fine-tuning the choice between equally eligible research proposals and in the selection of daring ideas; and (2) illegitimate problems due to networks. Science-policy measures to improve peer review processes should therefore clarify the distinction between field-specific remediable and irremediable flaws than is currently the case.

Discussions about funding research grants by lottery have centered on weighing the pros and cons of peer review, but this focus does not fully account for how an idea comes across in the field of science to those researchers directly dependent on research funding. Not only do researchers have personal perspectives, but they are also shaped by their experiences and the positions they occupy in the field of science. Applying Bourdieu’s field theory, the authors explore the question of which field-specific problems and conflicts scientists identify and for which they could imagine using a grant lottery in the allocation of research funding. Under what conditions does such a solution, which is external to the field of science, seem justified to them? The results show that different areas of application are conceivable for a lottery mechanism in the field of science but that its use seems justifiable only for legitimate field-specific quandaries.

The visibility of individual scientists and their academic performance plays a major role in gaining the creditability to get funded and to advance in academic positions. Therefore, web presences are increasingly used to boost one’s own visibility, disseminate research results and keep up to date with the research of others. However, previous reports show that these channels are not used equally by all scientists. Our study therefore investigates how faculty members (N = 868) at all universities in Lower Saxony (Germany) in the disciplines of physics, biology and chemistry present themselves on institutional websites and professional networking sites. We find that online presentations on institutional websites are mostly rudimentary. In contrast, there are more informative self-presentations on professional networking sites for both established (professors) and less-established (only PhD holders) faculty members. Our figures confirm observations that scientists present themselves online, but less-established ones seem to find less-supportive environments in academic institutions.

Research persistently shows that women are underrepresented in most science and engineering fields and obtain fewer research grants than men. In this paper we consider gender-related interests to investigate female and male scientists’ rates of submitted grant proposals and their selection of research topics in research areas of life science, engineering science, physical science and mathematics. Do men and women differ in their research preferences? Do they vary in respect of numbers of submissions and topics? To study submission rates, we analysed data about applications of the Experiment! Grant programme of the German Volkswagen Foundation to do unconventional research. To identify research topics, we additionally applied an LDA-based topic model. The findings reveal uneven proportions of submissions among men and women in different research areas. Regarding research themes, results suggest that men dominate in more topics than women.

The bold idea of random grant allocation is heatedly discussed as an alternative to peer review. The debate centers on advantages and disadvantages of the established measures to control scientific quality, compared to funding by chance. Recently, studies also investigated acceptance of lotteries in the scientific field. However, they provide only inconclusive findings due to their restricted scope. This paper examines scientists' views on current funding conditions and the idea of random grant distribution. An online survey of PhD holders reveals that most participants are against pure randomness, although they would try random elements if such procedures were combined with peer review. Moreover, while fewer established and recognized scientists differ in their assessments of peer review and expectancies on lotteries' impact, they hardly vary in their positions on random elements. Funding organizations therefore should be encouraged to further experiment with, and closely examine, practiced lotteries.

Soziale Medien und die Praxis gemeinschaftlich erzeugter Schlagwortsysteme eröffnen die Möglichkeit, Prozesse sozial anerkannter Typisierungen zu untersuchen. Typisierungen sind soziologisch besonders relevant, da sie durch Prozesse der Selektion und Spezifikation Sinn konstituieren, zur Kommunikation befähigen, als Auslegungs- und Orientierungsschema fungieren und damit routiniertes Verhalten ermöglichen. Anspruchsvoll ist hingegen die methodisch kontrollierte empirische Analyse der Stabilisierungen und Transformationen von Typisierungsprozessen. Das Working Paper diskutiert daher aus einer kultursoziologischen Perspektive Anforderungen an eine computergestützte Visualisierung solcher Prozesse anhand von gemeinschaftlich erzeugten Schlagwortsystemen.

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate about the validity of interview data and the ways in which they are interpreted in the ‘interview society’. We understand the need for an extensive reliance on interviews and, at the same time, recognise the serious limitations that exist regarding access to the interviewee’s worldview, their motivations and orientations. A crucial problem in this regard and the main concern of our paper is how to interpret subjective accounts, such as arguments or everyday theories, interviewees hold about themselves. While ethnomethodologists suggest that the complete authorship for meaning depends on the interview setting, we argue that the interviewee’s practices of generating interview content are quite stable across various sequences that allows for a reconstruction of their agency dispositions based on interview transcripts. Taking Mannheim’s and Bourdieu’s idea of a formative or generative principle as a point of departure, we introduce the most recent variant of the documentary method of interpretation (DMI) that aims at the reconstruction of this principle’s manifestation (as an individual’s frame of orientation) and helps us then to understand everyday theories, subjective explanations and justifications presented by interviewees.

BSE, Vogelgrippe oder Gammelfleisch - diese Stichworte sind ein fester Bestandteil der massenmedialen Berichterstattung. Welchen Stellenwert haben aber solche Ereignisse für die Menschen im Alltag? Wie arrangieren sie sich mit der permanenten Skandalisierung? Welche Skandale lösen bei ihnen überhaupt noch Irritationen aus? Diese Fragen bilden die Grundlage für eine empirisch-soziologische Untersuchung des alltäglichen Umgangs mit Lebensmittelskandalen. Entgegen anderen Untersuchungen geht diese Studie nicht von einer allgemeinen Betroffenheit und Gefährdungswahrnehmung aus, sondern arbeitet anhand von qualitativen Interviews unterschiedliche subjektive Erfahrungen, Deutungen, Reaktionen und Rechtfertigungen heraus und rekonstruiert diese in einer Typologie der individuellen Bewältigungsmuster.

Using peer review to assess the validity of research proposals has always had its fair share of critics, including a more-than-fair-share of scholars. The debate about this method of assessing these proposals now seems trivial when compared with assessing the validity for granting funding by lottery. Some of the same scholars have suggested that the way grant lottery was being assessed has made random allocation seem even-handed, less biased and more supportive of innovative research. But we know little of what researchers actually think about grant lottery and even less about the thoughts of those scientists who rely on funding. This paper examines scientists’ perspectives on selecting grants by ‘lots’ and how they justify their support or opposition. How do they approach something scientifically that is, in itself, not scientific? These approaches were investigated with problem-centered interviews conducted with natural scientists in Germany. The qualitative interviews for this paper reveal that scientists in dominated and dominating field positions are, more or less, open to the idea of giving a selection process by lots a try. Nonetheless, they are against pure randomization because from their point of view it is incompatible with scientific principles. They rather favor a combination of grant lottery and peer review processes, assuming that only under these conditions could randomly allocated funding be an integral and legitimate part of science.

Weisungsgebundene Ressortforschungseinrichtungen haben den Auftrag, sich in erster Linie praxisorientierter Problemstellungen anzunehmen und dazu zu forschen. In der Folge haben die dort beschäftigten Wissenschaftler nur eingeschränkte Möglichkeiten, Grundlagenforschung zu betreiben und an der fachspezifischen Erkenntnisgenerierung teilzuhaben. Vor dem Hintergrund der wissenschaftlichen Habitualisierung solcher Erwartungen untersucht der Beitrag daher, wieso Forschende in solchen Forschungseinrichtungen arbeiten. Die Analyse von Schilderungen des Bewerbungsprozesses an einem deutschen agrarwissenschaftlichen Ressortforschungsinstitut zeigt, dass solche Einrichtungen einerseits Anschlüsse an den erworbenen praktischen Sinn für die "dienstfertige" Wissenschaft und andererseits eine Stabilisierung der bisherigen Beschäftigungssituation im wissenschaftlichen Feld erlauben., Government research agencies are mandated to do applied research and to provide practical solutions. As a consequence, researchers in those agencies are restricted regarding basic research and participation in the scientific community. Such circumstances raise the question, why do researchers work in such research institutions although habitually expecting to contribute to the advances of their scientific field. The paper presents interpretative results from an analysis of narratives on application processes at an agrarian German government research agency. On the one hand, the findings show that government research agencies offer suitable conditions for an incorporated practical notion of useoriented research. On the other hand, researchers join to stabilize their working conditions within the scientific field.

In den letzten Jahren nehmen die Anwendungsvarianten computergestützter Verfahren für die qualitative Sozialforschung zu. Vor allem das Text Mining verspricht eine automatisierte Strukturierung größerer Textmengen. Während Einzelne darin ein großes Potential für die rekonstruktive Sozialforschung sehen, fehlt weitgehend unter den rekonstruktiv Forschenden eine Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Thema. Vor dem Hintergrund von Einzelfallanalysen mag dies berechtigt sein, aber bei der zeitgleich stattfindenden digitalen Durchdringung der empirischen Sozialforschung wird eine Beschäftigung damit unausweichlich. Wir brauchen Antworten, wie webbasierte Inhalte medienspezifisch zu interpretieren sind oder worin sich die rekonstruktive Sozialforschung von den Digital Humanities unterscheidet – wo bereits das Zusammenspiel von computergestützten Analysen und hermeneutischen Verfahren erprobt wird. Der Beitrag bietet daher einen ersten Überblick zu Text Mining-Verfahren, diskutiert die Sicht ihrer Vertreterinnen und Vertreter auf die qualitative Sozialforschung und nennt erste Überlegungen, wie und unter welchen Bedingungen der Einsatz von automatisierten Verfahren für rekonstruktive Herangehensweisen sinnvoll sein könnte.