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IE Policy for Managing Survey Respondent Anonymity

Context

Institutional Effectiveness conducts and receives the results of numerous across the institution surveys. Two examples are the NSSE and the Graduating Student Survey. Results from surveys are often broken out at different academic unit levels such as college and department or by respondent characteristics, such as gender. It is necessary that the responses are not shared in such a way to violate the anonymity of responses.

Purpose

The document describes our guidelines for breaking survey responses out at by different academic levels and respondent characteristics.

Policy

  • We always provide university level survey results for surveys which are administered across the institution.
  • We provide the results from such surveys for a given department when
  1. department level information is associated with student responses and
  2. at least five persons from that department were surveyed.
  • We provide the results from such surveys for a given plan when
  1. plan level information is associated with student responses and
  2. at least five persons from that plan were surveyed.
  • We provide the results from such surveys with demographic breakouts when
  1. the specific demographic information is associated with student responses,
  2. at least five persons from each demographic breakout subcategory were surveyed, and
  3. the demographic breakout is of particular strategic interest.

Approved December 18, 2018