Researching Rita

This paper has many voices, my own and those of my three research colleagues; together with the voices of those people who participated in our research project. Our/my paper functions on two levels; in the first instance it will provide an overview of the findings to date of a research project involving an investigation into women’s research activities at Central Queensland University. In the second instance it will provide an overview of the development of a Women in Research Program within this same University and discuss the practices and future plans of this initiative -- Introductio

Researching Rita : opportunities and constraints

Many studies have been conducted which document major impediments to women's overall progress within an academic environment (Cass, 1983; Jones & Lovejoy, 1980; Spender, 1991). These impediments have been identified as the predominance of women working on a part time basis, their concentration at the lower levels of staffing scales; limited access to decision making; career breaks due to child care and wife family responsibilities; lack of time; socialisation as teachers and not as researchers. Specific studies into women's research performance conducted by Converse and Converse (1971), Cole and Cole (1973) and Astin and Bayer (1979), found that in the aggregate, academic women are less productive with respect to research and publication than their male colleagues. More recently, Beattie (1993:51) concluded that: many women lecturers find themselves in an invidious situation as a result of mergers between universities and other institutions in the higher education sector. Women whose previous role has been full-time teaching become 'instant academics', inheriting the expectations of universities that academics will conduct research and will publish in prestigious refereed journals. Investigations carried out by Wilson and Hunt (1983) and Lie and O'Leary (1990) indicate that there are correlations between women's research performance and factors such as teaching loads and type and level of appointment. Wilson and Hunt's (1993) outcomes indicated that the combination of women's relatively higher teaching loads, their concentration at the lower levels of appointment scales and the fact that a higher proportion of women are appointed on a part time or casual basis, have been significant impediments in the enhancement of women's research. The aim of this proposed project is two fold. To examine the research performance of women staff at the Central Queensland University and to identify what women staff perceive as existing constraints and opportunities in developing a research profile at the Central Queensland University

Preliminary report from the Research Factors Survey 1994

This preliminary report provides an overview of research carried out to date on a URG project; An Identification of Constraints in the Development of Women’s Research as a Means of Developing Strategies to Enhance Research Opportunities. Analysis of the data is continuing. The focus of this report is to identify what staff perceive as existing constraints in developing a research profile at Central Queensland University and to highlight constraints particularly affecting women

On radial Schrödinger operators with a Coulomb potential

International audienceThis paper presents a thorough analysis of 1-dimensional Schrödinger operators whose potential is a linear combination of the Coulomb term 1/r and the centrifugal term 1/r 2. We allow both coupling constants to be complex. Using natural boundary conditions at 0, a two parameter holomorphic family of closed operators on L 2 (R +) is introduced. We call them the Whittaker operators, since in the mathematical literature their eigenvalue equation is called the Whittaker equation. Spectral and scattering theory for Whittaker operators is studied. Whittaker operators appear in quantum mechanics as the radial part of the Schrödinger operator with a Coulomb potential