Students looking to share their opinions with the University administration - or even just looking to score a new iPod - are taking a few minutes out of their day to respond to the University's student surveys.
In collaboration with the Office of Institutional Research, campus services and programs from the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program to the Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) use surveys to tap into the student body's opinions and behaviors.
In the fall of 2004, the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program sent out two online anonymous surveys. The first was a freshmen-only survey designed to get feedback on student's initial interactions with drugs and alcohol, and the second invited the entire undergraduate population to participate in a similar study on the presence of alcohol and drugs on the Tufts campus.
According to Margot Abels, Director of the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program, gathering student feedback is vital to the improvement of the services her program provides.
"It gives me some backing to make programs more realitybased, more credible and more useful," she said. "I can't do realistic programming if I don't have the information that I need."
Surveying students is only one of the many ways that Abels has gathered input from the Tufts community. In a town hall meeting last week, Drug and Alcohol Prevention staff met with members of the Tufts community to discuss the results of the surveys and hear faculty and student opinion.
Similar discussions are taking place in advisory board meetings that include students, Health Services staff, Residential Life staff, culture groups and members of campus fraternities and sororities.
According to Abels, dialogue with the Tufts community helps to "get a sense of what's a problem and what's not." As an example, Abels cited the recent cocaine bust that took place on Apr. 12: while news of the arrest created a big stir on campus, making some people believe that more attention should be given to the prevention of cocaine use, the fall surveys showed that for the general student body, cocaine use was fairly minimal.
While she believes that the cocaine issue should not be ignored, she maintains that the program's efforts should remain focused on alcohol and marijuana. "The survey data doesn't necessarily tell us that cocaine is a huge problem for students like marijuana and alcohol are," Abels said.
Surveys such as those used by the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program are often not mandatory. They rely on participating students to provide accurate information.
Dawn Terkla is the Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Research. She and her staff help the various offices that desire student feedback to create survey questions and provide them with analysis of the results. According to Terkla, response rates range from about 10 percent to 100 percent, depending on the population being surveyed, survey length and survey topic.
Terkla believes that the surveys with high response rates are very accurate, but admits that surveys with smaller response rates have a larger margin of error.
In order to encourage participation and consequently enhance accuracy, many of the surveys offer prizes, like an iPod, as incentive.
For some students, the chance to win a gift certificate to the campus bookstore or a new iPod mini is the major reason they take the time to participate. "I take surveys like the Dining Services survey and the Public Safety survey because there are prospects of reward," freshman Daniel Gross said.
Some students, however, are pessimistic about their chances of winning. "I don't answer surveys based on incentive," junior Ilan Behm said. "Entering into a raffle just to win a Tufts hat isn't worth my time."
Freshman Ben Levine agreed. "I did the first survey I ever got because I wanted a prize," he said. "But then I didn't win, so I never did one of those again."
"Anyway, I want bigger stakes than just an iPod," said Levine, jokingly adding, "I already have an iPod - I want a trip to Paris."
Though incentives do encourage some students to participate in surveys that they would otherwise ignore, there is no way to ensure that participants are offering honest answers.
"In terms of accuracy, that's totally dependent on the respondent," Terkla said. "We try to impress upon whoever the potential respondents are why this particular survey is important, why we're trying to collect the information and to assure them that their responses are very important."
This is more effective in some cases than others: surveys on topics that students deem important are more likely to be taken seriously. According to Behm, an RA in Hodgdon, freshmen were asked to evaluate their RA's in a survey given by ResLife, and the majority of his residents did not take the survey seriously.
"I found that the survey was pretty useless," Behm said. "My main feedback was that I have nice hair and smell good. The students don't take it seriously."
"There's no requirement to take the survey, nor incentive," he added. "Even if there was [sic] an incentive, you can't force someone to take a survey seriously."
When surveys are conducted, the results are analyzed first as a whole, and then broken down into subdivisions. Sophomore Neil Padover was the co-creator of this year's Senate surveys, which asked students to present their opinions on library hours, resolutions passed, and Greek life, among other topics. The Senate analyzed results by class year and by housing status (on- and off-campus).
Similarly, Abels says that the Drug and Alcohol Prevention Program plans to look at the feedback of individual subgroups including fraternity and sorority members, as well as by gender and ethnicity.
Abels and her staff are working with some of these subgroups to facilitate discussion about substance use in different campus groups. One way that she is doing this is through the Greek Working Group, in which discussion takes place with members of fraternities and sororities to find out "what's reality and what's reputation."
Gross, a Sigma Phi Epsilon brother, believes that it is very important for the University to seek out student opinions on Greek life.
"Given that the Greek system has suffered some major setbacks this semester, I think it's important that students voice their opinions on fraternity life to the administration before it is gone forever," Gross said.
