With the completion of the final focus group last Thursday, the members of the Campus Climate Assessment project team hunkered down to the task of sifting through hours of taped conversations and reams of handwritten notes. Fifty-odd PUC staff and faculty members from various areas of the university community offered their views during a four-week stint of focus groups which represented the major activity of the first phase of the campus climate study.

From this deposit of gathered anecdotal information, project team members hope to discern themes and issues that will provide a framework for the development of a survey instrument to be disseminated to PUC staff, faculty, and administrators during the Spring 2008 semester.

Information gleaned from both the focus groups and the survey instrument will eventually serve as talking points for a campus-wide discussion on ways to maintain and  improve the diverse academic and work climate of the PUC campus. Even at this early stage of data analysis, project researchers have confirmed what they already knew in theory — that campus climate is a complex composite of various localized environments that are continuously interacting, influencing, and recreating themselves. Thus, events and attitudes in one department, office, or school can significantly impact the other campus environments, while all the environments taken together form a recognizable and distinctive campus climate of the university.

The project team of the Campus Climate Assessment will be working with the study’s sponsor — the PUC Multicultural Campus Council (MCCC) — in creating venues for the discussion of its findings.