We are happy to report that we are swimming in data! Our survey closed at the end of 2022 and our intrepid team of researchers have started the process of sorting through all the data. The survey itself had 81 separate questions and our call for participants yielded over 500 responses. If you've done data collection before you know that the data is typically exported into a spreadsheet with one column representing one question and one row representing one respondent. For our survey, that would mean 81 columns and over 500 rows EXCEPT that we had to use questions with present tense for respondents who are currently enrolled students and questions with past tense for respondents who graduated in the last 5 years. That means we actually have over 150 columns and over 500 rows. Gulp. That's a whole lotta numbers on a spreadsheet!
Developing the survey, landing on a workable methodology and running data collection was challenging but now comes the really hard (and hopefully, fun) part: analyzing the dataset and disseminating the results in a coherent way.
Our team met today and began developing a plan of attack for the data set. We know already that our data set includes responses we will not be able to include in the final results for various reasons. That's true for any data set. There will be incomplete responses, responses from people who don't meet study criteria, etc. What we've started thinking about is what our criteria will be for determining which responses are included and which responses are excluded. Because the data set is so large, we also spent some time thinking about how we intend to report out the data we have. We expect that we'll be reporting a lot of descriptive results and that's actually a good thing. We're not aware of any other data set like this within our field and we have the first snapshot. Exploring the descriptives provides a foundation for future research that might begin to expand the snapshot, examine trends, and explore inferential, correlational and qualitative questions.
We'll keep you posted as we work through the data and we may even provide some sneak peeks of preliminary results here. Stay tuned for future posts to get a look at some of the survey questions we asked!