After a week of collecting data, in earnest, I'm not even close to the 100 response mark. I'm only at about 9% of my goal, but it's a start. I'm a little anxious about the response rate, especially the Phase 2 volunteers. Only 5 have opted to volunteer for Phase 2.
This is one of the issues I pitched to the cmte back in July and August, but they didn't seem worried. Maybe I understand my sample a bit better...maybe not.
I think part my response problem lies in the data collection itself. I was supposed to have had access to an email list with names and addresses of all students in my sample. But the tech people (Third Party Client Support) have been unable to find time to create that form for me. They said, "We'll get to this when we can." That's an actual quotation from an email. Apparently, I do not merit that kind of attention.
But I'm resourceful. I grabbed the CRNs (course registration numbers) for all the sections that were in my sample pool. I started creating my own list. However, when I went to grab the email addresses from the secure Intranet document, I discovered that the master list hadn't been updated since May 2014. 80% of my sample pool was missing.
Now I'm relying on my ENGL colleagues to push the link out to students and encourage them to take said survey, instead of my contacting those students directly. What's pretty funny, to me anyhow, is that our smallest campus has turned in the highest response rate and largest number of respondents. I am so thankful that the two instructors on that campus are really advocating for me. It does make me wonder about the others.
So, I'm hatching a new plan. I created a copy of the instrument and I'm trying to get student life to let me use their access to students as a proxy. I added a filter to the copied instrument, so that any student who is not currently in an ENGL 1101/1102 course would be routed out of the survey after the first two questions. We'll see if that works and IF I can get the support I need. In the meantime, we're off to soccer practice...
