Dr. Thomas Pavkov, director of the ISPR and one of the principal investigators of the PUC Campus Climate Assessment Study, spoke last week with the editor of the PUC Chronicle about the tentative results of the recently fielded Campus Climate Assessment Survey.

Dr. Pavkov gave a broad overview of the study process, detailing the steps taken to establish campus themes around which survey instrument questions were then fashioned. Addressing in particular the full-time staff component of the faculty-staff study, Dr. Pavkov noted what he considered to be an “excellent response [rate]” from full-time PUC employees. He also commented on the analysis, recommendation-formulization, and implementation processes by which the PUC Multi-Cultural Campus Council and Senior Leadership members will speak to issues arising from the survey data.

The complete Chronicle article can be viewed at the Chronicle’s website.

With the closing of the Campus Climate Assessment Survey earlier this week, the Project Team members began the work of tallying and analyzing the response data. Since the fielding of the Web-based survey instrument on March 18, hundreds of PUC faculty and staff employees representing each school of the university took the opportunity to contribute to a better understanding of the organizational environment of PUC.

The present task of the Project Team is fairly straightforward — transforming raw response data into scientifically comprehensible and usable material appropriate for analysis. From this point, various cross-tabulations will be carried out in order to determine the presence of any observable and statistically significant trends. The survey study will culminate in a written report and a public presentations of the study findings. The date and location of these presentations will announced in conjunction with the sponsoring client, the PUC Multi-cultural Campus Council.

As has been stated repeatedly throughout this study, data will be reported out only in the aggregate and no individually identifiable response data will be described.

Professors Thomas Pavkov and Cathy Gillotti, co-investigators of the PUC Campus Climate Assessment Survey, detailed assurances of the confidentiality and anonymity of the survey process in a message sent to all faculty and staff members of Purdue University Calumet.

While concerns related to the confidentiality and anonymity of participant responses had to pass the stringent muster of the Institutional Review Board of Purdue University prior to the approval of the survey instrument, for several weeks beforehand the Campus Climate Assessment Project Team had strategized how best to alert potential participants to these safeguards. The purposeful wording of hard-copy letters delivered to each faculty and staff member, followed up by email to each of these potential participants, was aimed to emphasize the measures being taken to ensure response confidentiality and anonymity –

     1. the parameters of the VOXCO survey software as used in the Campus Climate Assessment Survey create randomized monitoring information of respondents to be practically untraceable to individual respondents;

    2. once obtained, the responses are handled only by the four Project Team members;

    3. upon completion of the final analysis of data, all responses will be irretrievably purged and destroyed;

    4. when information obtained from response data is analyzed and reported, it is done so only in the aggregate — that is, no individual responses are identified or singled out; data is reported out only in terms of gathered response data; and,

    5. should, for any reason, a group of responses be able to be attributed to an identifiable group (or form an identifiable group), data will only be reported if that group has at least 8 or more members. In other words, if fewer than 8 responses come from what might be regarded as an identifiable group, none of that data whatsoever will be reported out in order to prevent even the possibility of individual respondent identification.

Given the assurances and continuing attention by Project Team members to matters of confidentiality and anonymity throughout this study, it is hoped that every faculty and staff member will feel confident and uninhibited as they add their voices to this important project. To feel otherwise would itself be a significant finding that this Campus Climate Assessment Study would wish to document.

If you as a staff or faculty member have any concerns about participating in this survey for reasons related to confidentiality or anonymity, please contact the Project Team at 219-989-3145, by email at campusclimate@calumet.purdue.edu, or by contacting Dr. Thomas Pavkov (ext.2029) or Dr. Cathy Gillotti (ext. 2009) directly. Your voice needs to be heard.

The Project Team of the Campus Climate Assessment is nearing completion of a survey instrument to be fielded to all PUC faculty and staff members this spring. Based in large part on themes and issues that arose during the faculty-staff focus groups, the survey instrument will try to provide a snapshot of perceptions of the worklife environment of Purdue University Calumet.

A comprehensive summary of the study’s findings will be presented in public venues following the collating of focus group and survey responses. The Campus Climate Assessment study is being conducted by the ISPR Survey Research Center under the auspices of the PUC Multi-Cultural Campus Council (MCCC).

The Institute for Social and Policy Research was recently awarded a $7,500 grant to support the development of a Support Center for Educational Mentoring as part of a Legacy Foundation funded initiative called the Indiana Expanding Access and Success in Education (EASE).  The purpose of this three-year project is to engage and/or build on current efforts to better understand the barriers faced by disconnected local youth in accessing and completing post-secondary education, and to take steps to improve access and success for these young people.  The target population for this project is young people, between the ages of 14 to 24, who are or have been homeless, in foster care, and/or court-involved. Faculty from Purdue University Calumet, Indiana University Northwest, Ivy Tech Community College, and Calumet College are currently developing a training program for educational mentors. 

Initial piloting of the curriculum will take place in March of 2008 with resources for the support center being procured during that same time period.  The training program will incorporate distance learning technologies that include discussion boards, chat rooms, and other forms of media that have proven effective in training a variety of individuals.