You will find many similarities in the ways in which people
respond when comparing student, staff, and faculty. This gives
me some measure of confidence in the data itself and in finding
something meaningful. By far sex, racial grouping, and sexual
orientation were characteristics that impacted responses across
the groups. Sometimes years at MTSU, for all groups, and
religious affiliation were important as well.
I did not include the graduate student information because I
am not confident in the data. First, few students responded and
of those who did there were many blanks given the students do
not spend a lot of time on campus. The data is available if you
want it, but I did not put it into the same summations as the
other groups.
The tests that I ran on the data were fairly simplistic –
mostly Chi-square, an occasional T-test and correlation. I did
this for simplicity of others’ evaluations and because the data
is not always conducive to more sophisticated analysis such as
multivariate analysis, but I will do additional analysis on
certain questions if that is desired and appropriate.
Finally I enjoyed this project and hope the committee and
university find the information useful. I do apologize for
taking so long, but when the work has been done mostly by me
alone, well…first I underestimated the time such a project takes
and it is easy to have this project overtaken by more pressing
demands.
Please let me know if you have other requests or questions
concerning these reports, findings, etc.
Recommendations:
The PCSW race and gender subcommittee needs to critically
review the information and make recommendations for programming,
workshops, etc as relevant. The committee should consider the
possibility of producing a document for others, beyond making my
summations available to whomever wants it.
Most large data sets that are compiled nationally are done at
least every other year so that longitudinal information is
gathered. I strongly recommend this survey be made available
every other year. Now that the survey is readily available,
easily updated, statistical comparisons readily established,
etc. it will be a relatively easy institutionalized practice.
This could be made available via the PCSW for little cost
(student worker familiar with SPSS and one summer salary would
be sufficient from now on) or part of institutional research. My
point is that I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions on a
one-shot survey, but I believe the survey has a potential to
provide useful information about both positive and negative
social change in our campus climate. Certainly as time goes by
questions would need to be revised, added or deleted.
We should work with the graduate student survey and try to
make it more useful.
Limitations of and recommendations for the data:
Obviously the sample is not random, therefore
generalizability is limited, but I stand by the value of the
information we received by making the surveys available to the
whole campus. (For those who may have forgotten, we made the
surveys available on the MTSU website for each of the groups
identified. Through various strategies we encouraged and
reminded people to take the survey which was available for
approximately 3 months). We would need to weigh the cost and
efficiency of random sampling for future surveys.
In an effort to assuage persons’ fears of not remaining
anonymous, we left off some identifying characteristics of
staff/administration and faculty. This needs to be changed so
that we can more readily identify target groups for programs,
activities, etc. For example, we did not ask about college
affiliation for faculty and I think we should next time. The
classifications for staff were confusing and became impossible
to separate respondents, therefore we did not know important
information about experience with various issues, etc. This
should change in future surveys.
Trying to decipher and organize comments was time consuming
with very little reward as most were individualized complaining
that lacked patterns. The only interesting comments among
students were when several identified a "bad" professor by name.
Among staff the most valuable comments were those related to low
salary, lack of ability and knowledge about advancement, and
subsequent decisions about looking for employment elsewhere. The
same could be said for those persons filling non-tenurable
positions across campus.
