Work continues on Grand Valley State University’s annual climate survey designed for learning about students, staff and faculty’s experiences on campus. The university-wide survey was conducted over two years ago, but GVSU faculty are still analyzing and interpreting answers.

While the survey was initially presented to the GVSU community in 2011, Neal Rogness of the GVSU statistics department said evaluating the answers given will take some time.

“The analysis of the myGVSU survey data is an ongoing process as additional questions which the data may answer are posed,” Rogness said, adding that the current focus is interpreting the topics and themes provided by participants in the written section of the survey.

With over 25,000 written comments and 25 open-ended questions, Rogness said each question needs a separate system, or rubric, to interpret the given answers.

“The rubric then serves as a guide for categorizing the content contained within the written responses,” he said. “Depending on the depth and richness of a response, one written comment may actually be classified as belonging to multiple categories.”

Rachel Campbell, an assistant professor in the sociology department, is involved with the analysis of the open-ended questions on the myGVSU survey.

“My involvement is solely with the qualitative component, which involves reviewing, coding and analyzing the extensive written comments provided by respondents to a variety of questions,” Campbell said.

She said the process for reviewing can be broken down into three steps, beginning with developing the rubric, reviewing each response and the codes that apply, and finally reviewing all the codes to learn participants’ opinions.

“This is a very time consuming process,” Campbell said. “One cannot just count the number of times a word is used because the context can vary, as can the way a word is used.”

With the analysis of each response, Campbell said consistency and accuracy is crucial, as evaluation of this data is an extremely important step in the analysis of the survey.

“While the responses to the close-ended survey questions give great insights into the experience of the GVSU community, it is in the written responses that people are able to provide examples and elaborate on their own perceptions,” she said. “This data will provide a depth of understanding that is very important in the development of recommendations.”

After the myGVSU surveys were presented to participants, Rogness said they then went to the Campus Climate Implementation Committee, whose goal is to better understand the answers provided by participants.

“The CCIC is charged with gaining a deeper understanding of the myGVSU survey data, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective,” Rogness said, adding that “members of the CCIC are already starting to assimilate recommendations based on their early findings.”

After analysis, all findings will be presented to the CCIC.

Rogness said analysis of the written responses will continue over the two summers and academic year.

With the study evaluation still ongoing, Rogness said it is hard to predict what changes to GVSU the findings could bring, but he predicts it will affect some aspects of the university.

“Grand Valley has an exceptional history of being responsive to matters raised by respondents on the three prior university-conducted climate studies,” he said. “I fully suspect that this track record will continue with the findings (from this survey).”

Many may wonder whether the survey data will be relevant by the time the information is extracted, but Rogness said that isn’t a concern.

“The data from the myGVSU survey (is meant to be) a snapshot on how respondents felt at the time of its administration in February, 2011,” he said.

As far as the future for climate surveys at GVSU. Rogness said the university has conducted one about every five years, so another should be expected around 2017.
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