New Member of the Team: Ellie!

The research team is so delighted to have Ellie Howe as our expert survey guru. When we started talking about the move of the survey from paper to an on-line version we sought out an enthusiastic quantitative graduate student.  Ellie Howe joined the team in December of 2013, and is a Higher Education Student Affairs Masters candidate. She received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2013. As the Graduate Coordinator of Off Campus Student Life, she strives to be a resource for off campus students and create engaging programming. Her research interests include gender based violence, stereotype threat, and psychological implications of campus climate. Her research specialties are questionnaire development, item design, and respondent recruitment. As a future student affairs professional, Elliehopes to do meaningful work with students that is grounded in theory and research.

Thank you Ellie for making this research process a little bit easier! 

Campus Climate & Possible Impacts to Research Study

If you didn’t hear about it before, back in mid November 2013, there was a student group, the Young Conservatives of Texas, at the University of Texas-Austin that was going to do a mock immigration sting on campus to prompt a discussion about immigration reform.  At this same time, our research team was wondering how to reach out to undocumented aspiring college students and college students.  Even though this incident occurred in Texas, far from Maryland, such incidents make undocumented youth weary of getting involved with anything having to do with identifying themselves as “undocumented.” Talk about creating a campus or national climate of fear by simulating “catching an immigrant” and getting rewarded for it, like the event at UT was considering?!

To respond to this event, the UT campus community composed of students, staff and community leaders, put together an on-line petition to revoke the student group on campus and had a protest regarding the event.  Documented and undocumented students were empowered to take a stance against this event.  We are really living in a time when more and more students are “UNDOCUMENTED and UNAFRAID.”  Eventually, the YCT student group was pressured to cancel their event due to the public outcry, the UT-Austin's administration’s disapproval, and the rally. 

Courtesy of Nia Wesley
Source: http://egbertowillies.com/2013/11/19/young-conservatives-of-texas/ 

Although students in UT-Austin may be unafraid on their campus, this does not mean that Maryland students are the same. As a research team, we still have to be aware of the possible tenuous campus climate that can ensue if events like this would occur here.  To ensure the safety and confidentiality of our study participants, we will not collect full names of those students who are interested in being interviewed, and the survey itself does not ask for any identifying information. 

We hope that our study will provide some context of the campus experience of undocumented Latina/o students in the state of Maryland. 

Utilizing Qualtrics

As a part of our research, we are utilizing Qualtrics to develop a questionnaire. Qualtrics offers a solid, secure platform while still allowing us to customize. One of the features of Qualtrics that we have utilized the most is skip and display logic.

Skip logic allows the user to bump respondents to further points in the questionnaire, depending how they answer certain questions. For example, our study has specific participant requirements such as age, student status, and first generation status. If a respondent doesn't fit the criteria of our study, we are able to bump them to the end of the questionnaire. This ensures that we are truly studying the target population.

Display logic is another feature that we have utilized significantly. Display logic allows us to have certain questions generated depending on how respondents answer certain questions. For example, if a student answers that they were born in the US, it wouldn't make sense for them to answer our questions for undocumented students. Using display logic, we can hide those questions so that the respondent only answers questions relevant to them.

Utilizing Qualtrics has been greatly helpful in developing our questionnaire. The options for customization allow us to make sure our respondents are answering questions relevant to their experience. As we implement the survey, I know we are all looking forward to using the many features Qualtrics offers for data analysis. More on that to come!