Some Personality Dimensions of Doctors of Education

OBTAINING THE doctorate degree is a long and, usually, arduous undertaking. A study of the records of almost 24,000 students of the Graduate Faculties, Columbia University, revealed the average length of time used in obtaining the doctorate ranged from 5. 3 years in chemistry to 12. 5 in Germanic lan guages. History and English required an average of approximately 10 years (5: 124). It is interest ing to speculate as to what types of individuals are able and motivated to complete a doctorate program. Despite the traditional emphasis placed on the role of intellectual ability, there is some evidence that certain personality dimensions come to play an ex ceptionally important role in completing the doctor al degree (3, 4: 5). As part of a study investigating the factors rela ted to the dropping out of doctoral candidates ( 6 ), the Bernreuter Personality Inventory (2) was ob tained on a group of 125 individuals holding the Doc tor of Education Degree. The responses represent ed a 69. 4 percent return on inquiries mailed toa random sampling of 180 individuals who had re ceived the Doctor of Education degree from Teach ers College, Columbia University. The 125 doctors who completed and returned the Bernreuter consist ed of 83. 6 percent men and 16. 4 percent women. The median age at the time of receiving the doctor ate was approximately 37 years with a range of 26 to 60 years of age. Prior to entering the doctoral program, the original sampling of doctors had back ground experiences primarily in professional edu cation. Some 28 percent had been in elementary and secondary teaching as compared with 31 percent in college or university teaching. Seventeen percent had been in public school administration while about eight percent had experience in college administra tion. The remaining 16 percent represented a great variety of occupational backgrounds. While the Bernreuter Personality Inventory has been severely criticized as an instrument for use in making individual analysis, there is evidence that it is effective with groups. In a very comprehen sive and critical review of the research on the Bern reuter, Super (7) states that ".. .the Bernreuter Personality Inventory has been shown to measure group trends with a reasonable degree of reliabil ity", and that a synthesis of findings "... points to the conclusion that it has considerable validity as a research instrument. " The Bernreuter professes to measure six per sonality "traits": neurotic tendency, self-suffi ciency, introversion-extroversion, dominance-sub mission, confidence in oneself, and sociability. The raw scores of the responding 125 doctors on each of the six scales were converted into percentiles ac cording to the norms provided for adult men and women. Tables 1 and 2 present the percentile dis tribution of the group on the six scales. Table 1 is concerned with neurotic tendency, self-sufficiency, and introversion-extroversion while Table 2 in cludes dominance-submission, confidence in one self, and sociability. A brief description of the traits, as provided by the manual of the inventory, will be given as the findings on each scale are pre sented separately.