Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is “environment?”

Dr. Susan Rankin of Rankin & Associates Consulting, which is serving as the outside consultant for the College of Engineering’s environment study, defines environment as, “the current attitudes, behaviors, standards, and practices of employees and students of an institution.” The environment is often shaped through personal experiences, perceptions, and institutional efforts.

2. Why is a positive environment important?

Dr. Rankin’s research maintains that positive personal experiences with an environment and positive perceptions of the environment generally equate to successful outcomes. Example successful outcomes include positive educational experiences and healthy identity development for students, productivity and sense of value for faculty and staff, and overall well-being for all.

3. Why is COE conducting a study of the learning and working environment?

The idea to conduct a college-wide environment study originated as part of the strategic planning process. This study will provide critical information that we need to understand and improve the learning and working environment in our College. We intend to repeat the study in some form every 3 years so that we can monitor progress on improving the learning and working environment in the College.

4. What will be done with data from the results?

The study results will be made available to all members of the College community through town-hall meetings and via the study website. We expect the results to reveal elements of the learning and working environment that we can celebrate and elements that we can improve. Dean Elnashai has expressed a strong commitment to act upon the findings of the study in order to improve the learning and working environment. Actions resulting from the study will be implemented through existing administrative structures unless there is a clear need for establishing new implementation structures.

5. What is the timeline for the study?

This initiative will include three primary phases. The first will involve the survey development (summer/fall 2015), survey implementation that will seek input from all students, staff, faculty members and administrators (spring 2016), and reporting of results (fall 2016).

6. Who will be conducting the study?

The Planning Committee, which includes a cross-section of students, staff, faculty members and administrators, has been charged by Dean Elnashai to conduct the environment study. After a review of potential vendors, the College selected Rankin & Associates Consulting to work with the Committee in the development of the survey for the study as well as the implementation of the survey. Rankin & Associates will analyze the survey results and provide a comprehensive final report (see question 7 for more information on the report).

Dr. Susan Rankin (Rankin & Associates Consulting) is the consultant working directly with us on this project. Dr. Rankin is an emeritus faculty member of Education Policy Studies and College Student Affairs at Penn State and a senior research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education. She has extensive experience in institutional environment assessment and institutional environment transformation based on data-driven action and strategic planning. Dr. Rankin has conducted multi-location institutional environment studies at more than 130 institutions across the country. She developed and utilizes the Transformational Tapestry model as a research design for campus environment studies. The model is a “comprehensive, five-phase strategic model of assessment, planning and intervention. The model is designed to assist campus communities in conducting inclusive assessments of their institutional environment to better understand the challenges facing their respective communities.” (Rankin & Reason, 2008).

7. What will be included in the final summary report?

The consultant will provide a final report that will include: an executive summary; a report narrative of the findings based on cross tabulations selected by the consultant; frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations of quantitative data; and content analysis of the textual data. The reports provide high-level summaries of the findings and will identify themes found in the data. Generalizations for populations are limited to those groups or subgroups with response rates of at least 30%. The committee will review draft reports and provide feedback to the consultant prior to public release.

8. Why was an organization from outside the College selected for the project?

The administration of a survey relating to a very sensitive subject like the learning and working environment requires special expertise that was not present within the College. Also, the use of an organization from outside the College is likely to yield higher response rates and provide more credible findings if led by an independent organization outside of the College.

9. How are the survey questions developed?

The Planning Committee worked with Rankin & Associates to develop the questions. The consultant has administered environment assessments to more than 130 institutions across the nation and has developed a repository of tested questions. The Planning Committee reviewed the survey questions from Rankin & Associates, selected questions appropriate to the College, and also created special questions that were needed to capture key elements of the learning and working environment. The Planning Committee reviewed input gathered through the study website as it developed the questions for the survey.

10. Why do some demographic questions contain a very large number of response options?

It is important in research on the learning and working environment for survey participants to “see” themselves in response choices to prevent “othering” an individual or an individual’s characteristics. Some researchers maintain that assigning someone to the status of “other” is a form of marginalization and should be minimized, particularly in environment research, which is intended to enhance feelings of community. Along these lines, survey respondents will see a long list of possible choices for many demographic questions. It is impossible to include every possible choice to every question, but the goal is to reduce the number of respondents who must choose “other.”

11. What is the response rate goal?

Our response rate goal is 100%! Every response matters and is valuable in providing the most beneficial feedback and results. We hope to receive responses from all students, staff, faculty members, and administrators in the College. The Planning Committee will consider a variety of incentives to maximize response rates.

12. How is a respondent’s confidentiality protected?

Confidentiality is vital to the success of research on the learning and working environment, particularly because sensitive and personal topics are addressed in such studies. While survey research cannot be conducted in such a way that guarantees complete confidentiality because of the nature of multiple demographic questions, the consultant will take multiple precautionary measures to enhance individual confidentiality and the de-identification of data. No data already protected through regulation or policy (e.g., Social Security number, campus identification number, medical information) is obtained through the survey. In the event of any publication or presentation resulting from the assessment, no personally identifiable information will be shared.

Confidentiality in participating will be maintained to the highest degree permitted by the technology used (e.g., IP addresses will be stripped when the survey is submitted). No guarantees can be made regarding the interception of data sent via the Internet by any third parties; however, to avoid interception of data, the survey is run on a firewalled web server with forced 256-bit SSL security. In addition, the consultant and the College will not report any group data for groups of fewer than five individuals, because those “small cell sizes” may be small enough to compromise confidentiality. Instead, the consultant and the college will combine the groups or take other measures to eliminate any potential for demographic information to be identifiable. Additionally, any comments submitted in response to the survey will be separated at the time of submission to the consultant so they are not attributed to any individual demographic characteristics. Identifiable information submitted in qualitative comments will be redacted and the college will only receive these redacted comments.

Participation in the survey is completely voluntary, and participants do not have to answer any question — except the first positioning question (e.g., student, staff, faculty) — and can skip any other questions they consider to be uncomfortable. Paper and pencil surveys are also available and can be sent directly to the consultant.

Information in the introductory section of the survey will describe the manner in which confidentiality will be guaranteed, and additional communication to participants will provide expanded information on the nature of confidentiality, possible threats to confidentiality and procedures developed to ensure de-identification of data.

13. What protections are in place for storage of sensitive data, including for future secondary use?

The College has worked with the consultant to develop a research data security description and protocol, which includes specific information on data encryption, the handling of personally identifiable information, physical security and a protocol for handling unlikely breaches of data security. The data from online participants will be submitted to a secure server hosted by the consultant. The survey is run on a firewalled web server with forced 256-bit SSL security and is stored on a SQL database that can only be accessed locally. The server itself may only be accessed using encrypted SSH connections originating from the local network. Rankin & Associates Consulting project coordinator Dr. Susan Rankin will have access to the raw data along with several Rankin & Associates data analysts. All Rankin & Associates analysts have CITI (Human Subjects) training and approval and have worked on similar projects for other institutions. The web server runs with the SE-Linux security extensions (that were developed by the NSA). The server is also in RAID to highly reduce the chance of any data loss due to hardware failure. The server performs a nightly security audit from data acquired via the system logs and notifies the administrators. The number of system administrators will be limited and each will have had required background checks.

The consultant has conducted more than 130 institutional surveys and maintains an aggregate merged database. The data from the COE project will be merged with all other existing environment data stored indefinitely on the consultant’s secure server. No institutional identifiers are included in the full merged data set held by the consultant. The raw unit-level data with institutional identifiers is kept on the server for six months and then destroyed. The paper and pencil surveys are returned to the consultant directly and kept in a locked file drawer in a locked office. The consultant destroys the paper and pencil responses after they are merged with the online data. The consultant will notify the committee chairs of any breach or suspected breach of data security of the consultant’s server.

The consultant will provide the College with a data file at the completion of the project.