Planning for the Survey
Obtain Institutional Review Board approval (due December 3, 2010)
In order to administer the MISO Survey on your campus you must obtain approval from your Institutional Review Board (IRB), a campus committee that oversees the use of human and animal subjects in research. This is a federal requirement for conducting research projects such as the MISO Survey. Research that has not received IRB approval cannot be published. The MISO Survey Administrator must receive proof of IRB approval before you may administer the survey at your institution.
Although the deadline for submitting proof of IRB approval isn’t until December 3, 2010, you should begin the process of obtaining approval at once since it may take as long as several months to complete the process. Web-based surveys are generally approved by campus IRB committees, so this should not be a difficult process – just one that may take some time. Your IRB committee’s website probably contains instructions for seeking approval.
To help you with this process, the MISO website’s Survey Administration page provides IRB proposals that were approved in the past at participating institutions and a summary of the MISO Survey for your IRB. Feel free to use these as a model for your proposal, and please contact your MISO Survey Team liaison if you have any questions. Once you have obtained a letter of approval, please forward this letter to David Consiglio.
Decide upon customized, optional, demographic, & local questions (due December 3, 2010)
The MISO Survey contains a very small number of core questions that ask survey respondents about IT and library services that are nearly universal at colleges and universities. These questions are a fundamental part of the MISO Survey instrument and may not be changed or excluded from the Survey. The MISO Survey Administrator can make exceptions to this practice in the following situations:
- Required questions can be customized if the question as currently worded isn’t meaningful to your campus respondents
- Required questions can be excluded from the Survey if your institution doesn’t offer the service measured by the question.
The Survey is mostly composed of optional questions, many of which are customizable. Some institutions opt to create their own local questions for inclusion in the Survey. Below is some additional information about optional, customizable, and local questions.
Optional questions
Most of the questions in the MISO Survey are optional and may be excluded from your institution’s survey instruments. In general, you may want to include optional questions that will inform future planning or evaluate critical services but exclude other questions that are not as useful for your organization. Be aware that each item on the MISO Survey usually takes about 4 seconds to complete, so think carefully about the time needed to complete the survey as you consider whether to include optional questions. Longer survey instruments tend to result in lower overall response rates.
Using the Survey Decisions Spreadsheet provided in the fall by the MISO Survey Team, record whether you plan to include each optional question in the survey instrument. We recommend that you seek input from your colleagues about inclusion of optional questions and review the spreadsheet with your management team before finalizing your decisions.
Customizable questions
The MISO Survey contains many questions (some core, most optional) that can be customized so that their intent will be well understood by survey respondents on your campus. For example, questions that ask about the “first point of contact for computer support” can be customized to replace this phrase with the name of your organization’s computer help desk. Using the Survey Decisions Spreadsheet provided by the MISO Survey Team, record your customizations. We recommend that you review them with your management team before finalizing your decisions. Be aware that you must include all of the core questions in your institution’s MISO Survey instruments.
Demographic questions
At the end of the survey, there are a series of demographic questions that are used by the MISO Team to gain added insights during our analysis of the national survey results. One of these questions focuses on the academic divisions at your institution and requires customization. Please record your institution’s academic divisions (ex. Fine Arts, Humanities, Social Science, and Sciences) in the Survey Decisions Spreadsheet. If you have previously administered the MISO Survey at your institution, the MISO Team recommends that you review the survey instrument used in the past and use the same academic divisions that appear there.
Local questions
Although many institutions choose to administer the MISO Survey with just the core and optional questions, you may decide to create questions that are specific to your institution. These questions may focus on areas of service or topics that are not addressed by the standard MISO Survey instruments. Once you draft your local questions, we recommend that you test them using a focus group to be sure that they will be clearly understood by survey respondents. (A focus group is composed of 5-7 individuals from the target population – faculty, students, or staff – who can tell you whether they understand what your question is asking and suggest other phrasings that may be clearer.) Submit local questions to the MISO Survey Administrator by sending him a separate document containing the text of each local question; a note about whether each question stands alone or should be included as an item in an existing question; and the location for each local question in the Survey instrument. If you have questions about testing or submitting local questions, please contact your MISO Survey Team liaison.
Send the Survey Decisions Spreadsheet to David Consiglio. If you opt to include local questions, please send them in a separate document to David Consiglio.
Decide whether to survey special campus populations (due December 3, 2010)
The MISO Survey focuses primarily on faculty, full-time undergraduate students, and staff. However, many institutions choose to survey additional campus populations (ex. graduate or professional students). Institutions that elect to survey additional populations are subject to an additional fee. If you wish to survey an additional population, please contact your MISO Team liaison for more information.
Draft campus messages (due December 17, 2010)
Your campus community will receive four emails about this survey during the Survey administration period. In addition, undergraduates will receive an additional message that precedes the invitation to participate. Some institutions also choose to send students an optional informal request for their participation.
These email messages will be sent according to the MISO Survey timeline. Most of these will be sent from Bryn Mawr College by the MISO Survey Administrator. The Survey introduction letter from your CIO should be sent using your campus broadcast mail system. To help you develop these messages to your campus, the MISO Team provides models in the MISO website’s area for Campus Survey Administrators.
The entire list of messages is as follows. Below is some detail about each one.
- Survey introduction email (sent from CIO to faculty, students, and staff via your campus broadcast email system)
- Pre-invitation email (sent only to students)
- Invitation to participate
- First reminder
- Optional informal request for student participation
- Second reminder
Survey introduction email
The very first message about the MISO Survey will be an email from your CIO, or another member of your institution’s senior leadership, to your entire campus community. This email alerts community members that the Survey is coming, explains its local value to your institution as well as its national purpose, and asks for campus participation. This first letter is very important since it associates the Survey with a senior member of your campus community.
Pre-invitation email (sent only to students)
This message, sent by the only to students selected for inclusion in the sample population, explains to students that they’re part of a select group invited to participate in the Survey and that their input is especially valuable. Sending this message has proven to greatly increase the student response rate. The message is sent by the MISO Survey Administrator but appears to come directly from you.
Invitation to participate
This message invites potential respondents to participate in the Survey and contains the link to the MISO survey hosted at Bryn Mawr College. This email is sent by the MISO Survey Administrator to all faculty, all students selected to participate in the Survey, and all staff. It is personally addressed to each Survey participant (“Dear Joe”) and appears to come directly from you. This approach generally produces a better response rate because people believe that you are personally asking for their help.
Be aware that you’ll receive many email responses after this message has been sent. Count the number of “out of office” replies and messages saying that the invitation email is undeliverable – you’ll need to supply this count to the Survey Administrator later. There will also be many emails from people who feel compelled to tell you that they will do the survey, that they have already done the Survey, or that they are very busy and will try to do the Survey later. Be prepared for an overly full Inbox.
First and second reminders
These reminders are sent to each individual that has not yet completed the Survey. They are generated by the Survey administrator, but they appear to come from you and are addressed to each individual recipient. Each person who receives a reminder will feel as if he or she is receiving a personal reminder from you. After each set of reminders has been sent, expect to receive email responses and personal comments as you walk around campus.
Optional informal request for student participation
This email, sent by the Survey administrator but appearing to come from the CSA, is sent the day before the second reminder and contains a personal message from the CSA asking students to respond to the Survey. The email also emphasizes how important student responses are, and how seriously this input will be taken. Institutions that sent this email in 2009 and 2010 greatly increased the number of students that responded to the Survey. For the 2011 Survey cycle, we strongly recommend that you send this additional reminder to your student participants.
Send the text of each campus message to David Consiglio.
Questions and Comments: survey@misosurvey.org
