Weekly Sprint 03 — Working with Qualtrics
This week, after modifying my survey, I was ready to send it out to more students. I added a short introduction to the beginning of the survey giving the participants an overview of how the responses will be used to inform my data visualization project. To gather qualitative data, I added a free response text box at the end with a short prompt:
“Please expand upon your experiences with diversity on campus by writing a short statement below. All responses will remain anonymous. Some things to consider may be how you fit in as a majority/minority student, or any thoughts about inclusion, cultural groups/stigmas, gender identity etc.”
I last distributed the link to the Class of 2017 Facebook page and got around 55 responses from senior students. I was pretty surprised about how many people took the survey within the three days that the link was posted. This time around, I joined other class pages to reach the underclassmen*. I also reached out to Black Student Union and Sigma Lambda Beta about how to communicate with the multicultural organizations on campus and they were able to forward my survey to their members. I was directed to contact the Office of Student Involvement to see if they could send out my survey to all registered organizations. I am still waiting for a response, but it would be a great way to reach a diverse number of students. The survey was sent out a second time on February 20th. So far I have received around 50 additional responses, with more still in progress.
I filtered out all responses recorded before February 20th and used the Reports feature on Qualtrics to analyze the previous data. Below are some of the visualizations. You can view the full report here.
What is your Race/Ethnicity?
What is your gender?
I feel like a minority on campus because of the following:
How often do you come in contact with people of the following backgrounds on this campus?
Again, the majority of these responses from the first distribution were from 21 year old, White/Caucasian seniors. The data so far does reflect TCNJ and what we already know about race/ethnicity and gender on our campus. Though I am not surprised by the data, I expect to see more variation when I gather responses from a better range of ages, races/ethnicities, etc. I am hoping that more members of multicultural organizations will be inclined to take the survey and that students will submit personal statements. I definitely would like to use this qualitative data to tell a story and add a personal element to the numbers and statistics.
*My request to join the Class of 2018 page is still pending. The survey has not yet been distributed specifically to the Junior class.
