Saturday, November 12
Questionnaire Design
Sat, Nov 12, 4:00 PM - 5:25 PM
Hibiscus A
Design Trade-Offs

Balancing Utility and Confidentiality in Designing Survey Data Collection and Reporting System (303544)

Miles Painter, American Institutes for Research 
*Yan Wang, American Institutes for Research 

Keywords: school climate surveys, data collection platform, data reporting system, confidentiality, flexibility

The ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS) platform is a school climate measurement and reporting system developed for schools, districts, and states by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. The EDSCLS platform contains four survey instruments and provides valid and reliable scale scores on 13 aspects of school climate besides item-level response frequencies. The platform is downloadable free or charge and education agencies can use it to store the data locally. The presentation will summarize the effort to provide maximum utility to education agencies while minimizing disclosure risks for respondents (i.e., students, staff, and parents). For data collection, the platform tracks submission by providing real-time submission rates and case dispositions. Login IDs can be distributed using the system’s email function or exported out to distribute outside of the platform. The platform displays a confidentiality pledge for survey administrators before they start data collections and a customizable informed consent page to survey participants before they proceed. After participants log into the survey, each is assigned a PIN, not accessible to survey administrators, for re-entry to the survey at a later time. The platform doesn’t store personally identified information and emails are deleted upon delivery of the IDs. For data reporting, survey results can be displayed on the screen and exported to PDF or Excel files at the close of a data collection. The platform can display a combined report for all units included in a data collection or individual reports for each unit (e.g., a district can see a district report as well as individual school reports). Education agencies can also combine separate data collections by importing data collected using another EDSCLS platform. The survey results are suppressed for any reporting categories if the number of responses is small. The presentation will end with a discussion about possible new features.