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U. sexual misconduct climate survey sees over 50 percent response rate

Fifty-two percent of undergraduate students and 53 percent of graduate students responded to the University’s sexual misconduct climate survey, according to Vice Provost for Institutional Diversity and Equity Michele Minter.

The University’s goal was a 50 percent response rate, Minter added.

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“This is a very high response rate for a survey of its type, so we are very pleased,” Minter said. “It should allow us to draw some very good conclusions about the campus experience.”

Surveys of this type conducted at peer institutions end up with response rates of about 30 percent, Minter said.

When asked about when the survey’s findings will be published, Minter said they would likely be released early this coming fall.

“There’s a lot of work to do to analyze the data which is in a really raw form right now,” Minter said. “We don’t want to release this at a time when students and faculty are preoccupied, and the campus doesn’t have time to take [the results] in.”

There needs to be a lot of work to contextualize the results to find out what they really mean, Minter explained.The findings of the Association of American Universities survey, which the University chose not to participate in after some students raised concerns about its applicability to campus life, will also be released sometime in the fall, Minter said.

Minter said she understood that the student response rate to the survey was demographically representative of the student body as a whole.

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Strong student-led efforts to boost participation, including video testimonials about why students were choosing to take the survey as well as social media advocacy, drove the high response rate to the survey, Minter said. Creative reminders by the University may have also helped, she added.

“We tried, in putting together the publicity campaign, to stress the notion that we needed to hear all campus voices because it’s not possible to have a representative sense of what’s really going on around campus if the only people who respond are those who feel like this has direct relevance to them,” Minter said about what the University did to ensure that potential bias was eliminated.“The goal was to eliminate the potential non-response bias.”

If the University’s aim was to garner an understanding of the sexual misconduct climate on campus, getting a representative sample of students to respond to the survey is more important than getting a majority of students to respond to the survey, University of North Carolina at Greensboro social psychology professor and sexual assault researcher Jacquelyn White said.

White has conducted research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice on the risk factors of sexual assault and also criticized the methodology of the AAU survey earlier this year in an open letter signed with Georgia State University psychology professor and sexual assault researcher Sarah Cook.

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“If there was anything in the method of recruiting students and putting things out there that encouraged certain students to respond and other students not to respond, then you don’t have a representative sample,” White said.“It seems like the University’s going to have to go back and, hopefully, they got enough demographic information that they can compare the demographics of students who responded to [the demographic of] their whole student body.”

In order to entice representatives from all groups to respond, White said she would recommend doing preliminary outreach to members of different races, clubs and sexualities to see what would make them want to respond to the survey.

“Given the context, that students were encouraging other students to complete the survey, I’d say that’s why you got to over 50 percent,” White said. “That’s a pretty good rate. The only way you can evaluate who’s in that sample, though, and how that compares to who’s on your campus is [through] your survey.”

One of the biggest difficulties with conducting this type of survey is the type of people who are motivated to respond, Cook said.

Cook has also conducted research sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about sexual consent norms.

“There’s some general system that says that people who have complaints are more likely to answer surveys than people who don’t have complaints, but you won’t really know how that plays out in your survey until you look at the data,” Cook said.

She added that it is difficult to plan for how to represent the results of the survey, because how meaningful the results are depends on what one finds about the demographics of the sample after the survey is conducted.

“You have what you have,” Cook said.

The Office for Civil Rights, which mandated that the University conduct the so-called “climate check” as part of its resolution agreement with the University over allegations of violations of Title IX, and Vice Provost for Institutional Research Jed Marsh, who is analyzing the University’s data,did not respond to requests for comment.