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Nontraditional Student Survey - Fall 1997

Analysis

Email vs Phone Respondents
The responses of email respondents were compared to those of phone respondents. Phone respondents and email respondents rated the importance of various types of information, the importance of various activities, and the extent to which they had problems with various areas very similarly. However, phone respondents reported slightly higher satisfaction than email respondents for several items. Phone respondents may have reported higher satisfaction because they are in fact more satisfied than the students who completed the email questionnaire, because they were reluctant to express dissatisfaction to a "real-live" person from a CU-Boulder office, or because of some combination of these two factors. No weighting of responses was done to take into account the slightly greater satisfaction of the phone respondents (who could be considered as representing all non-respondents).

Continuing vs New Respondents
The responses of continuing students were compared to those of new students. Continuing and new respondents responded very similarly to all items. As such, results for each group are not reported separately. However, for all analyses, we have weighted to compensate for the oversampling of new students.

Comparison of Importance to Satisfaction Ratings
Students' importance ratings were compared to their satisfaction ratings to determine for which items there is the greatest difference in importance and satisfaction (i.e., to determine for which items satisfaction is much lower than its importance would dictate). To do this comparison, raw scores were converted to a numeric scale were 0 is the worst possible rating and 100 is the best possible rating. We call this scale "percent of max," for percent of maximum possible rating. For example, on the 1 to 5 satisfaction scale, a score of 1 would be 0%, a score of 3 would be 50%, and a score of 5 would be 100%. On the 1 to 4 importance scale, a score of 1 would be 0%, a score of 2 would be 33%, a score of 3 would be 66%, and a score of 4 would be 100%.

Last revision 07/08/05