USG launches new web tool to gauge students’ priorities

"Which do you want more?" is an interactive feature that combines suggestion box and survey features to gauge the relative priority students assign to different campus issues. The website presents students with two randomly selected options and asks them to pick the one they prefer. Students can also add their own suggestions.

Every user sees two random suggestions for each choice with the restriction that users never see the same two options twice. The random pairings allow the USG to evaluate the relative importance of many suggestions.

"Through this website, we can better assess the interests of the student body and individual student concerns," USG president Josh Weinstein '09 said in an e-mail. "It's a great way to generate ideas, as well ... [W]e hope to use this website to bolster our research and improve the USG's effectiveness."

"Even though each user does not individually vote on all possible pairs of suggestions, by combining the inputs of all users we can create an accurate picture of what students really care about," David Benjamin '10, who helped create the site, said in an e-mail.

The website collected 9,300 data points in the first two hours after its public launch, Weinstein noted.

So far, "Eliminate the 2-packaged-items limit at Late Meal" has almost always beaten out other options presented to students. Respondents select that option more than 84 percent of the time.

"Make late dinner available Friday" and "Raise late meal allowance" are the two most important issues to students, according to weighted tabulated results.

The data collected, which will be broken down by class year and residential college, will ultimately result in a ranked list of suggestions that will allow the USG to prioritize its initiatives. "The data collection is an ongoing process," Weinstein said. "One great thing about the site is that there's complete transparency, so people can see the results at any point."

The idea arose from a graduate seminar Weinstein took last spring, SOC 596: Web-Based Social Research, taught by sociology professor Matthew Salganik. "I got really intrigued with the material and brainstormed ways to integrate what I learned into USG," Weinstein said.

The project combines the "advantages of a survey in that the results are quantifiable" and the merits of a suggestion box "in that the ideas come from the bottom up," said Salganik, who was closely involved in the development of the new feature.

Used alone, both surveys and suggestion boxes leave gaps in the type of data collected, Salganik said, explaining that a standard survey only obtains information about the specific questions asked, while a standard suggestion box provides no data on the amount of support for a given idea.

"But imagine if, when the suggestions are coming in, they could take subsets of those suggestions and ask people to vote on them," he said. "If you aggregate [the suggestions] in a wise way ... you can have this community-generated and community-sorted info."

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Student participation is central to the feature's success. "I'm very surprised, in particular, by the number of clicks per user," Weinstein said. "My main hope is that we can reach out to more people so that we have a significant percentage of the student body clicking at least a few [times]."

Benjamin agreed. "The ideas of people who vote only a couple of times and those who vote hundreds of times are all heard," he said. "The site is great in that voting is very simple. Each vote takes less than a second."

Weinstein and Salganik said they hope to eventually extend this kind of web-based social research to the greater community, working with computer science graduate students Bill Zeller and Nadia Heninger to "build a sort of general web platform that other organizations - not just organizations at Princeton, but organizations anywhere - PTAs, community groups, local government - [could use for] the similar purpose of learning about what it is people value," Salganik said.

Web research itself is itself a relatively new concept, Salganik noted. "[New technology has] made a huge impact, but it hasn't really changed the way we do social science," he said, adding that "anytime you're working in a new medium, there are new methodological and ethical questions."

"I think Josh and David have been doing fantastic work," he added. "It's very amazing to me. The response already has been tremendous, and this is something that wouldn't have been possible five years ago."

The website is accessible to members of the University community at point.princeton.edu.