Campus Survey Coordination
The Center of Institutional Effectiveness supports surveys of broad institutional importance and helps the campus use existing data and survey resources effectively. The level and type of support depend on the project's scope, purpose, requirements, and available capacity.
Two levels of support
Self-service and targeted technical support
Faculty, staff, and students can use the survey guidance on this website to select a tool, locate training, and follow recommended survey practices.
General Qualtrics feature questions, survey-building instructions, and routine troubleshooting should begin with available training and self-guided resources.
CIE can help when an issue requires UC Merced Qualtrics brand-administrator access. Examples may include account settings, user permissions, group-library administration, project ownership, or another brand-level configuration.
Institutional survey consultation
Faculty and staff may request more extensive support for institution-wide surveys, administrative surveys, program reviews, and evaluations.
Students proposing an institutional-level survey should work with a sponsoring faculty or staff member.
Support is scoped project by project and may depend on the institutional purpose, schedule, complexity, data requirements, and available capacity.
Services for campus-level survey projects
Depending on the agreed project scope, CIE may provide support in the following areas.
Planning and consultation
- Initial consultation
- Review of whether a survey is needed
- Identification of existing institutional data
- Coordination with related institutional survey activity
Instrument development
- Survey instrument design
- Question review
- Qualtrics programming
- Accessibility-informed design and testing
Survey administration
- Contact-list support
- Survey distribution
- Launch and administration planning
- Project-specific scheduling
Results and reporting
- Analysis
- Reporting
- Dashboard development
- Responsible presentation of results
Service boundaries
CIE does not generally design or administer personal, classroom, or unit-level projects that do not have a broader institutional purpose. For those projects, campus users should use the available survey guidance to select an appropriate tool and locate training resources.
CIE may provide targeted assistance when a Qualtrics issue requires brand-administrator access. General feature guidance, survey-building questions, and routine troubleshooting should begin with available documentation and training.
Anonymous and confidential survey designs
Anonymous and confidential are different survey designs. The respondent-facing description should accurately match the survey configuration, distribution method, data access, and reporting practices.
Anonymous survey
An anonymous survey is designed so that respondent identities are not associated with responses.
Whether a survey can accurately be described as anonymous depends on the complete survey build. Relevant considerations include the distribution method, authentication settings, embedded information, response tracking, metadata, question content, and access to results.
A survey should not be described as anonymous until the complete design has been reviewed.
Confidential survey
A confidential survey may allow authorized project staff to connect identities or identifiable information with responses.
Access to identifiable responses should be limited to project team members with an appropriate university business need.
Results should be presented in a way that protects respondents and avoids unnecessarily exposing individual responses or small groups.
Important: Anonymous and confidential surveys are not interchangeable. The description provided to respondents must match how the survey is configured and how the resulting information will be handled.
Information security and higher-risk information
Confirm requirements before collecting higher-risk information
Do not begin collecting protected, sensitive, or regulated information until the project team has confirmed that the selected platform and the planned access, storage, sharing, retention, and reporting practices are appropriate.
Information that may require additional institutional review includes:
- Social Security numbers
- Immigration or citizenship information
- Financial account or payment information
- Health or medical information
- Passwords or account authentication information
- Government-issued identification numbers
- Other information that could create significant harm if accessed, used, or disclosed inappropriately
These examples are not an exhaustive list. The type of information being collected may affect the appropriate collection tool, access model, storage location, distribution process, retention plan, and reporting method.
Qualtrics should not be used to collect higher-risk information unless the project has received an appropriate institutional review and the proposed use is consistent with applicable requirements.
Responsible use of survey information
Survey information should be accessed and used only for authorized university business.
Access should be limited to individuals with an appropriate university business need. Survey information should not be shared with individuals who do not have approved access.
Results should be presented at an appropriate level of aggregation. Reporting should avoid presenting identifiable responses or unmasked small-group results when those results could expose individual respondents.
Survey information should be handled in accordance with applicable privacy, information-security, accessibility, data-governance, and records-management requirements.
Accessibility
CIE works to make survey content and survey reporting accessible. Accessibility considerations inform survey structure, instructions, response controls, keyboard operation, validation, testing, alternative access, dashboards, documents, and communication of results.
Survey projects should use clear instructions, meaningful labels, understandable validation messages, and layouts that work across different screen sizes.
Testing should consider keyboard use, assistive technology, mobile presentation, survey logic, response options, and access to assistance or an alternative format when needed.
Prepare a consultation request
Providing the following information will help CIE understand the request and determine an appropriate next step.
- Project sponsor and responsible campus unit
- Decision, requirement, or institutional need the project will support
- Intended survey population and estimated scope
- Existing data, dashboards, reports, or surveys already reviewed
- Proposed launch date, close date, and date results are needed
- Draft survey questions or instrument, if available
- Requested services and expected deliverables
- Privacy, information-security, accessibility, research, or other project requirements
- Planned use, analysis, reporting, and follow-up
Schedule and possible costs
Project schedules are determined individually. Some recurring institutional survey timelines are published in the campus survey calendar.
CIE does not currently charge for consultation or support. A project may have separate technical or vendor costs, including optional paid Qualtrics services. Any possible cost should be identified and approved before a paid service is used.
Request help
Review the available survey guidance first. If institutional survey consultation or UC Merced Qualtrics brand-administrator assistance is needed, contact Analytics Hub.
Email Analytics Hub View CIE contact information
A separate survey intake form is not yet available. Survey requests may currently be sent to Analytics Hub by email.
