Data Management Plan: Surveys

Data overview (and related processes)

-What are the goals of the data collection?

The goals of the data collection are to provide academic units and the Graduate School information about the factors influencing UW graduate applicants’ decision to accept or decline the UW’s offer of admission.

-What types of data will be collected, analyzed and shared?  Will individual- and/or aggregate-level data be shared?

Both demographic and program-level data will be collected, analyzed, and shared.  Data will be presented in aggregate form to authorized UW Business Intelligence (BI) Portal users and will not be redacted.  Individual response data will also be provided to authorized users of MyGradProgram (MyGrad) for their program only.

-How will the data be collected? Will the analytical methods used (tools and parameters) be defined?

Data will be collected from Qualtrics and downloaded to a local data source.  The data will be presented in Tableau dashboards and in MyGrad.

-What is the relevant history/background of the project, including internal and external partners and stakeholders?

The Accept Offer and Decline Offer surveys were designed by the Graduate School in consultation with various Graduate School units and launched in November 2013.

-Are there any dependencies?  Are there units, complementary data sets, or projects (either internal or external) which require data from this project or that are required for this project for successful operation/production?

The Graduate School, to enable a more valuable presentation of this data in Tableau, integrates data from the University’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and the Graduate School’s local data source that stores the applicants’ application for admission to the UW Graduate School.  The data integrated from the EDW consists of the applicants’ residency, ethnicity, and Under-Represented Minority (URM) designation. Data from the applicants’ application for admission to the UW Graduate School consists of the applicant’s citizenship, applied for entry year and quarter, the applied to degree program, and an updated field indicating whether the applicant enrolled in the applied to program.  

Access and data sharing

-Who will have access to the data?  Will the general public have access to some or all of the data?

Survey data will be published on the BI Portal and available to all authorized BI Portal users, but not available to the general public.  It is likely that individual academic units and the Graduate School will report select data in both internal and external reports. 

–Will access to certain data or certain components of the data be restricted to designated persons?

Text comments from the survey will be available only to designated authorized users for each academic unit in MyGrad.  All other survey response data will be available to all authorized BI Portal users.

-If data access is restricted, what are the justifications/criteria for restricting access?

Text comments are useful mainly to the individual academic programs that they are referencing, and possibly somewhat more sensitive in nature than the survey’s other questions.

-What will authorized persons who seek to obtain data need to do to comply with any data access restrictions?

Those wishing to review the basic survey data will need BI Portal access, while those wishing to review their academic unit’s text comments will need to have MGP Access to view survey data.

-Will those granted access to the data also able have access to this data management plan? (Advised).

Yes.

Reporting strategy

–What is the specific product/s of the data that will be shared?

Responses to non-text accept/decline surveys will be shared on Tableau dashboards.  All data, including text comments will be displayed in MyGrad for individual academic units.

-What is outside of the product scope?

Additional analysis related to correlations between applicants who accept the admission offer and those who enroll and attend UW.

-Where will the data to be shared be located and accessed?

Most survey data will be accessed via the UW’s BI Portal.  The survey data accessed via the UW BI Portal is located in two locations, in an extract on the BI Portal Tableau survey and in the Graduate School’s local data source.  Text comments will be accessed via MyGrad, and are located in the Graduate School’s local data source.  The survey data is also located on the Qualtrics servers and available only to authorized UW users in the Qualtrics system. 

-When will the data be prepared and shared?  Is there a reporting schedule?

Data will be updated annually after the April 15^th acceptance deadline and subsequently uploaded to the BI Portal in the following 1-4 weeks.

Data protection (privacy, backups, retention, intellectual property, etc.)

-Is any release of data compliant with FERPA and university policies?  (This can be confirmed by the UW Attorney General office).

No. Information submitted by applicants are not protected by FERPA.

-What data sharing agreements will be necessary to appropriately restrict the transfer of that sensitive or confidential data to others and to require that data be used only for its intended purposes?

None.

-Who will be operationally responsible for ensuring that no personally identifiable information is made available? See above.  No protection is required.

-Is the data being backed up in any way?

The Graduate School and the University also locate this data in backups of the BI Portal Tableau servers, the EDW databases, and the Graduate School’s local data source.  Backups of the Graduate School local data sources are stored on Graduate School servers for 2 months and an offsite University-owned backup system.  Qualtrics, Inc. presumably has backups of their data to maintain the data in the case of a disaster.

-Who has intellectual property to the data (typically the University)?

The UW Graduate School.

Change management

-What sort of future changes might be made to the data collection, analysis, or reporting efforts?

Possible revisions, additions, or removal of specific survey questions.

-What is the process for proposing or implementing those changes, and which units are responsible?

Requested changes should be directed to the Computing and Information Resources division of the UW Graduate School.  Except for extreme circumstances, changes will be made only when there are no applications for the desired implementation quarter.