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CU-Boulder 1998 Community Survey

Situation for You Scales

The scale created to capture students' assessments of "the situation for you" is not parallel to those for "the situation for your group" and "the situation for you as a group member." The situation for you scale consists of 41 items, whereas the other scales each contain three. In both the your group and you as a group member scales, two of the three items ask students to rate their situation relative to that of students in other racial/ethnic groups. Thus, in these two scales, students are largely making comparative judgments and are using other groups as a reference point. In this case, very few students said that their situation was "much better" than that for other groups. However, in the situation for you scale, students simply judge how good or bad their situation is, without reference to other groups. In this case, many students selected the most positive ratings, such as "very comfortable."

Because of this difference in response formats, it is possible that students' higher ratings of their own situation, compared with the two group-oriented ratings, are solely a function of the response formats.

In order to rule out this possibility, we did construct a "situation for you" scale that was directly parallel to the other scales, including the two items asking about treatment relative to other students. Average scores on this shorter scale were lower than on the full "situation for you" scale for all groups. Even so, scores on the "situation for you as a group member" are even lower for all groups, and scores on the "situation for your group" are lower still for all groups except white students, compared with the 3-item "situation for you" scale. This indicates that the relative assessment of the situation for oneself and one's group does not change depending on which version of the scale is used.

We replicated all statistical analyses and tables to ensure that our conclusions would not change if we used the shorter situation for you scale. Indeed, although the average ratings are lower across the board on this scale than on the long version, none of our reported conclusions are affected by this difference.

The longer scale more completely captures a multifaceted view of students' experiences and feelings about their CU-Boulder experience, longer scales tend to be more statistically reliable, and the shorter scale does not provide any different information. Therefore, we have reported only the results for the longer scale throughout the report.

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Last revision 07/23/02