The Student Assembly will conduct a widespread web-based poll of 1,200 undergraduates to gauge student opinion on specific recommendations of the steering committee's report issued in January.
The forthcoming poll -- which will be released in the first week of March -- is one component of an Assembly report that will be submitted to the Trustees. Chair of the Assembly's Student Life Committee Casey Sixkiller '00 conceived this project.
"The reason for doing this is to make sure in our report that student voices are heard. We are careful about using [the words] 'majority' or 'minority' opinion," Sixkiller said. "We're out to say to the Trustees, 'this is what students think.'"
The driving force behind the poll is to supply the Trustees with specific numbers, and thus represent what students think more scientifically and credibly, Sixkiller said.
"We noticed that holistically students are quick to criticize the report, but when you break it up into recommendations, we begin to see students are not as critical and the places where students are very supportive of recommendations," he said.
Sixkiller's aim is to break down the report to "extrapolate where those places [of agreement] are in the poll as well as the places of contention."
Other components of the Assembly's report to the Trustees will be entrance and exit polls conducted during Assembly meetings, discussions at those meetings and upcoming discussions at each residential cluster. The Assembly is also trying to assemble such a forum for students living off campus.
The poll is currently in a preliminary stage, with some questions still unwritten.
According to Sixkiller, questions will address the seven recommendations, but the number of questions relating to each recommendation will fluctuate depending upon the potential for opinion.
"We don't want a poll with 20 questions concerning recommendation four [major changes in the Greek system], but since it is a big recommendation, there will be a lot of questions about it," he said.
The entrance and exit polls will guide the development of the forthcoming poll. These polls have been taken to see if opinion shifts in response to discussions during the course of the Assembly's general meeting, Sixkiller said, noting evidence of a small shift.
The poll will be a web-based survey and participants will have several options to respond or be asked to rank choices, generating more detail than merely selecting 'yes' or 'no.'
The poll will be comprised of a random sample of 1,200 students, a number derived from the statistical significance needed to properly represent student opinion.
Selected students will be notified in a BlitzMail message with a hyperlink to the web site to solicit their participation.
As with any survey, the student response rate is of some concern. End of the term time constraints coincide with the length of the poll, which Sixkiller indicated may take approximately 15 minutes to complete.
While Sixkiller said a 100 percent response rate is ideal, 70 to 80 percent would be the next best scenario, although rates above 50 percent would still be considered significant.
Sixkiller credits government professor Lynn Vavreck's public opinion class as the inspiration behind his realization of how polling mechanisms could metaphorically serve as a thermometer of opinions about the report.
Despite initial plans to conduct the poll over the telephone, the idea was scrapped in favor of the advantages offered by a web-based survey. Sixkiller said the Internet yields higher response rates and offers the possibility of monitoring how many people have responded.
A team of advisors will aid in the project's completion. In addition to College statisticians and the Dean of the College's office, government professors Linda Fowler and Vavreck, who both piloted the New Hampshire primary polling, will scrutinize the design of the questions.
