Guidelines for Doing Surveys of Students, Staff, and Faculty at Reed
Surveys can be useful tools, but the sheer number of surveys can result in survey fatigue and reduced response rates. The purpose of these guidelines is to improve survey operations and results, and to minimize common negative impacts of surveying.
Below are general considerations all members of the Reed community can use when surveying other members of the Reed community. Faculty and students may be exempt from strict adherence of these guidelines when surveying for research or classroom work, but should be thoughtful when surveying Reed community members. There are additional guidelines for staff, which are linked to at the bottom of the page.
Institutional Review Board
If necessary, seek approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Hint: if it's research, i.e. "designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge" then it needs to get IRB approval. If it's coursework or work done as part of Reed's operations, then it might not need IRB approval. See http://www.reed.edu/irb/
Survey Coordination
To aid survey coordination, inform the Survey Coordinating Committee (Mike Tamada, Ellen Kotler, or Meghan Wieters) at least a month prior to your planned survey date, however planning a semester or more in advance is preferred in order to find the best window for issuing a survey. The Survey Coordinating Group tries to reduce schedule conflicts between surveys and therefore departments with a planned survey should connect with the Survey Coordinating Team to review the survey calendar.
The Survey Coordinating Committee may have some suggestions or questions. For example, does this survey need to be sent immediately? Alternatives include: doing the survey some other time or every several years instead of every year, surveying only a fraction of the community, combining your survey questions with another survey, and other assessment options, such as interviews or focus groups. The Survey Coordinating Committee is also compiling a "Question Bank" of survey questions issued at Reed. This can assist in identifying if data on a particular issue may already be available and/or support alignment for partial longitudinal analysis when possible.
Confidentiality
When sharing your survey results avoid disclosing personally identifiable information (PII) unless the survey is specifically designed for respondents to identify themselves. For example, if your categories or cells contain fewer than 5 people, combine them with other categories or cells. Surveys can be run anonymously, but in most cases it is better to promise respondents that their responses will be kept confidential rather than anonymous. (See Resources for additional best practices.)
Privacy Policy and Right to Erasure
To comply with data privacy laws, all surveys and survey emails must include a statement linking to Reed’s data privacy policy similar to this: "Personal information collected through this survey is covered by the Reed College Data Privacy Policy." with a link to https://www.reed.edu/policies/data-privacy.html. Surveys run on Qualtrics will automatically have footers with this statement.
Industry regulations, such as GDPR, require us to respond to requests to delete personal data. If such a request is submitted, contact Instructional Technology Services or the Institutional Research Office to erase the data within Qualtrics. It is the responsibility of the survey administrator to erase data that has been downloaded.
Survey Software
Reed College has a site license for Qualtrics, which is easy to use, robust survey software. Faculty and students should contact Instructional Technology Services for information about using Qualtrics; staff should contact the Office of Institutional Research for help with your survey needs (contact Mike Tamada or Ellen Kotler).