Survey Guidelines for Staff
Surveys sent to Reed students, alumni, faculty, or staff, should be referred to the Survey Coordinating Committee (Mike Tamada, Ellen Kotler, or Meghan Wieters), so that they may review the survey, coordinate the timeline of the survey in conjunction with other surveys, and for final approval. This is an effort to help with quality survey creation, to minimize similar surveys from being administered, and to create a central location of all survey data for key stakeholders at Reed to utilize for strategic planning and decision making purposes.
Incentives
The use of incentives is discouraged. To boost survey participation without excessive cost, groups should focus on making people feel heard and appreciated rather than relying on expensive incentives.
Administration
Surveys may be administered by Institutional Research, or by individual offices once Qualtrics training has been completed.
Review
- After notification of a proposed survey, the review of draft materials may take two weeks or more depending on the survey instrument.
- Review will entail:
- making sure that all questions are unique and have not been asked in a recent survey, where data has already been collected
- reviewing the timeline of surveys to ensure there is no overlap between other surveys being conducted on the same population
- ensuring a survey is the best format for collecting the needed information
- deciding if involvement through IRB is needed
Exceptions to review
All surveys being distributed to students, faculty, and staff must be approved in advance unless they meet one of the following criteria. Please note that although the survey is not required to go through IR, the IR office is still available to help.
- administrators who are surveying those under their purview,
- staff conducting surveys within their own department or unit,
- course evaluations,
- questionnaires and assessment forms for collecting feedback on college events, venues or services
- small-scale surveys (fewer than 50 people being surveyed)
- coordination forms to facilitate event planning, scheduling, or general logistics
Roles & Responsibilities
Sponsor/ Liaison - point of contact and project manager for department’s survey
Responsible for:
- Promoting survey in order increase response rate (includes creating materials, posting in Campus News, etc)
- Project management (for annual or regular surveys) run point on planning for survey, scheduling, and coordination with IR/Survey Coordination Committee. This includes your team keeping tasks on your calendar for efforts leading up to the survey (as opposed to expecting the Survey Coordination Committee reminding your team to put in requests to issue survey, etc)
- For external surveys (e.g. HECC, NCHA, HEDS), the role of the sponsor is to be the liaison with that entity.
- Preparation for survey - prepare the key questions you hope the survey will answer.
- Analysis - planning and discussion for analysis (e.g. timing, workload, requests for assistance)
- Funding - funding source for any fees for external surveys.
Best Practices
It is generally encouraged to share results back with your respondents. This can include how you are using the feedback from the survey and general description of results.