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Survey Research Policy

What is the process for sending out a survey to a group of Roanoke College staff, faculty, students, and/or alumni?

If you’re interested in sending out a survey to Roanoke College staff, faculty, students, and/or alumni, your first step is to identify the purpose of your survey. If your goals are strictly to learn more about perceptions, processes, interests, etc. for the purpose of improving or assessing Roanoke College functions, your project likely doesn’t meet the criteria for “research”.

 That is, if you intend to use the data generated from your survey(s) to improve internal processes, and you do not intend to publicly present or publish the findings, it may fall under the category of quality improvement or quality assessment, which would not necessitate review by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). For more information in determining whether your survey requires IRB submission and review in the first place, please refer to the Determination Form.

Once you've determined that your survey project does fall under the umbrella of "research", it must be reviewed by the IRB. You should submit a New IRB Application in order for it to be reviewed. The IRB review ensures that appropriate protections against harming human subjects are in place, and that appropriate privacy and data security protections are used. The right of participants to be appropriately informed prior to participation is also protected.

Anyone planning to administer a research survey to Roanoke College students, parents, alumni, faculty, or staff must first obtain IRB approval. In addition to the human subjects protection review done by the IRB, requests to survey members of the Roanoke College community will be reviewed by several administrative offices. Surveys of external groups not associated with Roanoke College must be reviewed by the IRB, but those reviews won’t involve the administrative offices. 

People who use student, parent, alumni, faculty, or staff contact information or demographics in a survey project must handle all information and results in accordance with Roanoke College information security policies. Approved surveys must be administered and used strictly as approved, without changes.

All surveys constituting research require review by the IRB. The administrative office review is also required whenever the researcher wishes to do any of the following:

  1. Use names, addresses, e-mail addresses, or phone numbers for a group that includes college related individuals not directly under his/her normal supervision.
  2. Propose to survey a large group of students, parents, alumni, faculty, or staff, either with a paper survey or with an electronic survey.
  3. Request information about the demographics of college related individuals in the survey population. Any such information must be specified and justified in the IRB proposal, and must be FERPA compliant.

Examples:

  1. A faculty research survey that includes all faculty, or all staff, or all students.
  2. A student research survey for a class that seeks to survey many students outside the class, or seeks to survey faculty, staff, or other groups.
  3. Staff supervised local or national surveys of broad groups of students, faculty or staff.

Exclusions from the extra administrative office review requirement

All research with human subjects need to be reviewed by the IRB, but that review does not always need to include the administrative office review. Some exclusions from the requirement for administrative office review appear below. Note that the exclusions do NOT apply if the results of the survey will be published or will be presented in a presentation open to the public. Surveys which may be used in public presentations and publications must be reviewed, regardless of the exceptions below.

The administrative office portion of the IRB review is not required for:

  1. Evaluations of events by participants.
  2. Feedback from customers at the point of service (e.g. bookstore, dining services).
  3. Teaching or advising evaluation forms.
  4. Surveys of a group of people who fall under the normal supervision of the person doing the survey.
    1. Faculty surveying students in their own courses.
    2. Administrators surveying employees they supervise.
    3. Academic administration surveying faculty.
  5. Forms used to collect information for administrative purposes (e.g. scheduling, declaration of major, etc.).
  6. Surveys for a course in which only students in the course are surveyed.
  7. Focus groups or individual interviews.
  8. Surveys of prospective students by professional staff for the division of Enrollment Management, which will be reviewed and approved directly by the VP for Enrollment or his/her designee.
  9. Surveys of parents, alumni, or friends of the college by professional staff for the division of Resource Development. Those surveys will be reviewed and approved directly by the VP for Resource Development or his/her designee.

 Approval criteria to be used during the administrative office review of surveys

  1. The survey must have been approved by the IRB as part of the human subjects protection review process.
  2. The participant list must have been approved by the appropriate college division.
  3. The survey should not run at the same time as another higher priority institutional survey of the same participants. Multiple surveys using different subsets of a population can run simultaneously.  Surveys related to coursework often fall in the final month of the semester, and may require some overlapping surveys.
  4. The survey will not cause the total number of surveys of the target population in a given year to be excessive.  
  5. The survey should not seek information that is already available from other sources.
  6. Any demographic information requested as part of the survey must be included in the IRB application, and must be in compliance with FERPA regulations.
  7. The survey should be sufficiently well-constructed (clear, appropriate questions). 
  8. If survey software will be used, it must use federally approved data transfer security. College licensed software (Qualtrics) is available at no cost to campus users, and is the preferred choice. The paid version of Survey Monkey may also be used, but the free version may not, due to insufficient security. 
  9. Thee creation of the requested contact list information will not exceed available staff time.
  10. The survey results will have perceptible benefits to the college or the members of the college community. For college-wide surveys, a copy of the final results report must be provided to the Office of Institutional Research, so results can be used by others on campus when appropriate and when allowed by Institutional Review Board policies.

A note on contact lists for surveys on campus

The actual contact list to be used typically will be constructed/selected by the Institutional Research Office, based on the subject selection criteria. In most student projects for coursework that seek to survey students, a representative sampled list of students will be used. Several matched non-overlapping contact lists are available and used in rotation for different surveys, reducing survey fatigue. Representative sampled lists will be used in other cases whenever appropriate, but some use of full lists will be needed. For electronic surveys on campus, typically the Institutional Research Office distributes your survey invitation on your behalf.

After you receive official approval from the IRB in the form of a Certificate of Action (CoA), you should contact both ir@roanoke.edu and irb@roanoke.edu with your survey request and your official CoA attached.