A common inquiry from participating institutions and instructional staff focuses on the confidential nature of CUTE survey responses. The short answer is that instructional staff responses to the survey are confidential to their institution and CUTE staff. Although not technically anonymous, CUTE staff do what they can to ensure that instructional staff respondents can be confident that their responses are not individually identifiable.
In preparation for sending the survey invitation, follow-up, and reminder e-mails, CUTE staff assign a survey identification number, called surveyID, to all participants in order to track responses. This surveyID connects instructional staff names and email addresses during the survey administration. This link allows us to report institution-level response rates and to discontinue contacting instructional staff who complete the survey or decline participation. CUTE staff will never report individual information, such as which particular instructional staff have or have not responded, to participating institutions.
When data collection is complete, identifying information (respondent names and email addresses) is not included with the respondent data. CUTE staff then analyze the data and create individual institutional reports. Each participating institution receives their reports as well as an electronic file containing their institution’s raw data. It is important to note that demographic responses (gender identity, racial/ethnic identification, etc.) are included in this data file. If requested by the participating institution, CUTE staff can withhold demographic information from the institution’s raw data file.
Sixty days after survey administration closes, CUTE staff will destroy instructional staff names and email addresses in respondent information to further ensure that respondent identities will not be compromised. The respondent database is permanent, but this does not contain information that would allow instructional staff to be identified once the sampling files have been destroyed.
Because CUTE staff return data that includes participant-provided answers to certain demographic questions, some combinations of responses (e.g., part-time female assistant professor in physics who teaches a general education requirement) could reasonably identify an individual instructional staff member. For that reason, CUTE staff require participating institutions to agree to the following procedures and safeguards: