North Carolina State University
Introduction
This series of reports presents findings from the 1999 Sophomore Survey at NC State University. Beginning with a pilot study in 1997, NC State has surveyed its sophomore student population each spring semester. Eligible sophomores had completed 45-59 credit hours, with at least 30 at NC State. Students from all 10 undergraduate academic units, including the First Year College, were included in the study.
This introductory report describes the survey methods and compares survey respondents to the survey population on gender, race/ethnicity1, and academic unit. The next report in the series,1999 Sophomore Student Survey: All Respondents, is an overview of all students who participated in the sophomore survey. It presents summary statistics for each survey topic, including student background characteristics and interests, their assessment of the academic environment and faculty contributions, their evaluations of student services, and ratings of the extent to which NC State has contributed to their knowledge, skills, and personal development. The survey questions and detailed tables of responses by gender, race/ethnicity, and college are available on the World Wide Web.
Survey Methods
RespondentsAnalyses
These reports attempt to provide a level of detail that makes the data more accessible and interpretable to the novice data user. A primary purpose is to highlight patterns found in responses to related question items or between comparison groups. Such consistencies among items or between groups are usually more important for understanding the data than are the sizes of the differences between individual pairs of ratings or ranks, or, to some extent, whether the differences are statistically significant.3 While some individual small differences might be statistically significant, they may not be substantively meaningful. On the other hand, when even relatively small differences yield consistent patterns within a similar series of questions, the results are potentially more telling. Demographics of the Sophomore Class and Survey Respondents Gender and Race/Ethnicity (Table 2-1)
White African-American Asian Hispanic Native American Total Academic Units (Table 2-2)
Table 2: Classification by Academic Unit
Academic Unit Engineering 26.8 483 30.2 353 Agriculture and Life Science 18.0 324 16.4 192 Management 13.2 237 15.6 182 Humanities and Social Sciences 12.2 219 9.4 110 First Year College 8.6 155 6.5 76 Education and Psychology 4.8 86 4.7 55 Textiles 4.5 81 4.4 51 Design 4.1 74 4.6 54 Forest Resources 4.1 73 3.8 45 Physical and Mathematical Sciences 3.8 68 4.4 52 Total 100.0 1,800 100.0 1,170
The data obtained from completed surveys were analyzed using standard statistical methods. Because the response rate is high (65%) and the number of eligible sophomores is fairly large (1,800), the margin of error for these results is low (1.0 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval). That is, if 73.0 percent of respondents said they would choose this campus again, we can be 95 percent sure that the true figure would be between 72.0 percent (73.0 – 1.0) and 74.0 percent (73.0 + 1.0) if all eligible sophomores had responded to the survey.2 The margin of error increases as the sample size decreases, so statements for various subgroups, such as the separate figures reported for whites and African Americans in the Web tables, are less precise than statements based on the total sample. For example, 106 (58%) of 186 eligible African American students responded to the survey, but the population is only one-tenth as big as the whole population for the survey. As a result, the margin of error for figures reported for African Americans is larger (+4.1 percent at the 95 percent confidence interval).
There were no significant gender or racial/ethnic differences between the eligible sophomores enrolled at NC State in the spring of 1999 and those in the survey population. The sophomore class was 42.7 percent female, compared to 43.6 percent of the survey respondents. About 82 percent of the sophomore students were white, 10.3 percent African American, and 7.2 percent other minorities. Among survey respondents, 84.1 percent were white, 9.1 percent African American, and 6.8 percent other minorities.
Note: Survey respondents are included in figures for the Sophomore Class
Racial/Ethnic Group
Table 2-2 presents enrollment of sophomore students and survey respondents by academic unit. Again there were no significant differences between the sophomore class and the survey respondents. The largest percentages of sophomore students were enrolled in the College of Engineering (COE) followed by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).
For more information on the 1999 Sophomore Survey contact:
Dr. Nancy Whelchel, Associate Director for Survey Research
Office of Institutional Planning and Research
Box 7002
NCSU
Phone: (919) 515-4184
Email: Nancy_Whelchel@ncsu.edu
Posted: February, 2000
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