The academic mind revisited: Contextual analysis via multilevel modeling

Abstract

Contemporary studies of the politics of American professors compare their political preferences to those of the American public. That some professors exhibit more liberal attitudes than the public leads critics to ask whether this difference biases teaching and enforces political correctness that stifles the study of controversial topics. To provide an alternative substantive and methodological paradigm for future studies of academia-one that focuses on social contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes-this chapter briefly reviews Lazarsfeld and Thielens's The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. They studied the effects of McCarthyism on academia, documenting how contextual and personal variables influenced the professors' apprehension, i.e., worry and caution. This chapter then applies multilevel statistical modeling to their pivotal three-variable contextual tables, showing how contemporary statistical methods can advance their analysis by close inspection of tabular data. Multilevel models can incorporate simultaneously the effects of numerous contextual and individual variables, providing measures of effects and appropriate tests of significance for the clustered data. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.