The Campus Climate Study Committee recognizes that confidentiality of respondents is critical to the success of our climate study, especially as it centers on sensitive and personal issues. Collaborating with an experienced external consultant (UIC Survey Research Laboratory) provides all respondents students, faculty and staff with assurance that their answers will be strictly confidential.

The UIC Survey Research Laboratory will take multiple precautionary measures to enhance individual confidentiality. No personally identifiable information will be shared, and the UIC Survey Research Laboratory is working to ensure that responses will not identify individuals before providing the data and reports to Wayne State.

To protect individual responses, we will report overarching themes. In addition, group responses with less than 10 individuals in a given data marker will not be reported. For example, if a department has fewer than 10 female employees, we will not report females as a data marker for that department. Open-ended responses are intended to guide further research on specific topics, unless there is clearly an overarching theme that emerges.

Update (October 2018): The UIC Survey Research Laboratory contract with WSU will expire on December 30, 2018. UIC has provided the WSU Climate Study Committee non-identifiable data files to facilitate deeper and subsequent data analysis. No personally identifiable information from the individual responses will be made available to the university from the UIC Survey Research Laboratory.