Spring Break
Student-run survey gives voice to campus
First-ever Blue Hen Poll results reveal student body sentiments
by Sarah Lipman
Issue date: 5/6/08 Section: News
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"I'm yawning," Wilson says to his class. "Give me a reason to care about it."
"Maybe we could run a cross-tabulation on student groups and morality to see what results that generates," a student says.
Wilson encourages the student, and the rest of his class, to do so and keep their minds open to other results that may be hiding underneath the pages and lists of data from the survey. He tells the class they need to think about each story and result and find out what makes it different from their original theory.
"Think about it for more than 30 minutes," he says. "Ask people and find out what they have to say. Then take that and see what you can extract from it."
Wilson and his students are working to learn the results from the data of the first-ever Blue Hen Poll, a public opinion survey run by students, which will be released today at 2 p.m. in the Trabant University Center Multipurpose Room A.
Blue Hen Poll 2008 - an idea conceived by Wilson last Spring Semester - was the central focus of his course, which provided his class of 13 the opportunity to apply data analysis skills first-hand. The project was funded in conjunction by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness and the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Havidan Rodriguez, with the intention that the project could sustain itself after the grant and can continue in future years.
"The whole basis of this project, the learning goal, was quantitative reasoning - to make students not be afraid of statistics and numbers in their learning and in their classes," Wilson, who has taught at the university for almost two years, said. "One way you can do this is to do something that's real, conduct the poll, and then have them just apply the numeracy."
Before teaching at the university, Wilson worked as a statistical consultant at Gallup, an organization which studies numerical research on human behavior and opinions. While there, he helped create reports on methodological issues and researched people's attitudes and behaviors on specific surveys and results. He said the Blue Hen Poll draws the most influence from Gallup in its methodology.
"Polling is something that happens every day, so I'm just applying the methodology - just like being a cook," Wilson said. "You can be a cook and learn to cook at Burger King, but when you go to teach cooking you're not applying Burger King's principles. You're applying the principles Burger King uses to do their cooking."
In the case of the Blue Hen Poll, the methodology is called survey methodology, something Wilson said works no matter who conducts it. The class applied the same principles Gallup would use to the University of Delaware.
The survey sampled 1,500 full-time undergraduate students provided by the Office of Institutional Research and Planning on a variety of questions including topics such as satisfaction with the university, career preparation, civic engagement, political behaviors, the War in Iraq and terrorism, United States foreign policy, moral values and more.
The Web-based Blue Hen Poll was released on March 13 through a program called Qualtrics, which sends the survey via e-mail, and remained in the field until April 11. Students took an average of 12 to 15 minutes to complete the poll. During that time, 643 students, or 43 percent, of those surveyed responded. Wilson said the return response of the survey is a successful one because everything is relative to population.
"The response rate is an indicator of how much people took part," Wilson said. "It doesn't indicate how representative your sample is - that's indicated by the randomness of your sample."
The margin of error of the results, Wilson said, is 4 percent. This means the class has a 95 percent confidence level in the results they discovered.
Junior Mary Beth Lombardo, a student of Wilson's, first served as a teaching assistant for his POSC300 class, Introduction to Data Analysis - a course required for all political science majors. She said Wilson approached her and two other teaching assistants with the idea of the survey and they began researching how to make it come to fruition. When it came time to register for the Spring Semester, they enrolled in the class.
When creating the survey, Lombardo said Wilson and his students set out to promote democratic values within the university. They were interested in learning how students think and behave, and believed that because the survey was run by students for students, they would likely receive a more honest response.
"This survey is so important because it's coming from the student body and it's giving students a voice for the first time," Lombardo said. "It's allowing them to feel freer to tell us what they really think. A lot of the time, if a survey comes from the administration, they may be more inclined to lie or fudge the truth, but since it's comng from us, maybe they feel they can be completely 100 percent honest.
"Students think, 'They're not going to take my data and use it against me,' " she continued, adding, "Maybe they just trust us more."
How satisfied are students with the university?
In an undergraduate student body of approximately 16,000, many students find it hard to decipher whether or not university administrators care about what they have to say about the university.
"I feel like the university treats its students as a number and a paycheck instead of actual people," one student wrote in the open-ended comments section at the end of the Blue Hen Poll.
Another wrote, "Good to see at least someone cares what the students think."
Some students even believe they were "tricked" by the university into taking the Blue Hen Poll because of the number of other surveys campus administrators put out.
Not all of the comments, however, were negative.
Many students enjoy their time at the university - from the Registered Student Organizations down to their majors and sustainability efforts - prefacing their comments with "I love UD" or a "thanks for letting us get our voices heard."
According to the results of the Blue Hen Poll, the vast majority of students are satisfied with the university. There was a 90 percent consensus on satisfaction and 87 percent of respondents felt a sense of pride in the University of Delaware. The highest statistics regarding feelings about the university were in the "friends" and "major" categories. Approximately 90 percent of respondents were satisfied with their friends and 85 percent of students were satisfied with their major. Students were most dissatisfied with Student Health Services and the quality of the fitness facilities on campus.
Junior Caitlin Kennedy focused her story and data analysis on student-faculty relationships and feelings about majors on campus. She said her class decided to grade the university in the satisfaction category, much like students receive grades in their classes.
The university received three A's - representative of the respondents' contentment with the value of their education for their money, friends and major. The university was given a B in students' confidence that UD will help them reach career goals and a C+ in how much they believe the university cares about students.
According to the Blue Hen Poll, 34 percent of students believe the university pays "little" or "no" attention to them.
Kennedy said she found the correlation between student-faculty relationships and approval of the university most interesting and decided to focus her analyses on that significance.
"I found that the faculty at the University of Delaware is giving more in supply than students demand for in the realm of professional development," Kennedy said. "These factors correlate with satisfaction and pride in the university because when students seek opportunities for professional development, they're more likely to be more satisfied with their major.
"If they're more satisfied with their major, they may be more likely to recommend the university to others in the future."
Take that, Princeton Review
Senior Laura Coogan and the rest of Wilson's class had not heard of the Princeton Review's ranking of the University of Delaware in their survey titled, "Election, What Election?"
Out of 366 colleges and universities throughout the United States, the Princeton Review ranked the university fourth based on its perception of political awareness of the student bodies.
"When this class concept came up, we didn't know about the Princeton Review report," Coogan said. "It almost came as an added bonus and gave us even more purpose to look at ways to make people see why we're doing this."
Wilson said the political behavior questions in the Blue Hen Poll attempted to falsify or verify the Princeton Review's claims.
The survey found approximately 75 percent of respondents reported they were "very" or "somewhat interested" in politics. The more interested a student is in politics, the more they exhibit political behaviors like planning to vote in the November 2008 presidential election (92 percent), commit time to volunteer work (53 percent) or attend a meeting about a political issue (24 percent).
Coogan said students are more likely to take part in private political behaviors rather than public.
"People are more likely to engage in private political behaviors for a couple of reasons," she said, "possibly because of the fear of offending others on campus."
Fifty-three percent of university students are Democrats, whereas only 22 percent of the respondent population identified themselves as Republican.
Coogan said she and her partner, senior Richard Goldschein, decided to study the results of political behaviors and feelings about presidential candidates as their story, or main focus of the Blue Hen Poll outcome.
"I'm a political science major, so obviously politics and the election interests me," she said. "But the political interest results have become even more fascinating because it turns out so many people actually are talking about it."
Goldschein said he chose to code the results for presidential candidates' appeal to university students. He discovered students have a "love-hate relationship" with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is everyone's "second favorite." When analyzing the results surrounding Republican Sen. John McCain from Arizona, the data shows he has little chance of winning over students on campus.
Goldschein said he and Coogan also found that political party affiliation weighs most heavily on issue approval, but not on political involvement.
"When this first started, we didn't know what the political barometer at UD was," he said. "Now, we kind of have a good idea of that, or at least a better one. When everything is said and done, we created a bigger and clearer picture."
Presenting the data
"Our first dry run?" Wilson asked. "It went as a dry run should go."
After weeks of coding and recoding data to decipher results of the Blue Hen Poll, the students of POSC413 are set to present their findings to administration, poll respondents and the student body.
Junior Lucas Dominica was one student enrolled in the class who gained experience in statistical analysis and the program used to run tests. The program, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, took a lot of time outside of the classroom to understand.
"We spent a lot of time outside of the classroom meeting to put together our presentation and analyzing the data," Dominica said. "I would say this week - almost 10 hours."
Coogan agrees, and said she and her peers have gotten to know one another on a different level, becoming friends more than classmates.
"We're just students so we'll kick back and enjoy ourselves in the [Pearson] lab," she said, "but when it's time to get our work done, we all do. We have a well-functioning working relationship with one another and Professor Wilson."
Yesterday, the students met one last time in a small conference room in Smith Hall to hold another dry run before the presentation at 2 p.m. today.
"We're on a time restraint here, so let's pretend this is the actual event," Wilson said.
He promises to be their harshest critic, this way they are prepared for any questions that may come their way during the actual event. Wilson's students take a deep breath and open their final version of the slides, briefly reviewing index cards with prepared speeches and points they plan to reveal during the 45-minute presentation, which will be followed by a question and answer session.
Ultimately, the students of POSC413 said they hope the results will be heard by students and faculty and can be elaborated on or taken to the next level. Coogan believes there is so much to the data that has yet to be uncovered and would like to see a change or result come from further examining the results.
"I think what we have is very interesting stuff and it can be taken to 10 other levels just diving into it," she said. "You can do that for a 35-minute presentation, but now that the data's out there, I hope the university can utilize it and do more with it.
"We did the first step to see the response, so now groups can take that data and if they see a change, they can work with it."
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Ed Bayley
posted 5/06/08 @ 6:54 PM EST
Will the Blue Hen poll results be posted? If so how can I access them?
Amanda
posted 5/07/08 @ 10:01 PM EST
Any information about the Blue Hen Poll can be found at this website: http://udel.edu/~dcwilson/bluehenpoll.html
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