Administration Protocol and Procedures
Who NSSE surveys and why
NSSE surveys and reports on all first-year and senior bachelor’s degree-seeking students, consistent with our belief that higher education assessment should include all students, not just those fitting the traditional age, full-time student profile. Applying these criteria across all participating institutions helps ensure the integrity of NSSE results for benchmarking and group comparison.
If you have questions about NSSE’s survey population, surveying other types of students, or receiving custom analyses based on particular sub-populations, please contact your Project Services team.
Recruiting Respondents
The NSSE project is governed by the Indiana University Bloomington Institutional Review Board (IUB IRB). IUB IRB limits recruitment to five direct contacts and only approved recruiting messages may be used. NSSE’s secure web-portal, the Institution Interface, provides an easy resource to customize recruitment messages so they are tailored to your campus. Promotion of NSSE should be guided by campus-culture, but also must fall within the parameters of IRB guidelines. Most importantly, promotion should always reinforce that participation in NSSE is voluntary. Capitalizing on a student’s genuine investment in their education is often the best way to encourage participation. Incentives of cash or prizes can be effective, but a student’s confidence that NSSE results are being used in meaningful ways to improve the quality of education should not be underestimated as an incentive to complete the survey.
Promoting NSSE participation on your campus is important for increasing institutional buy-in. Suggestions for general promotion and incentives can be viewed here.
Terms of Participation
Institutions that register for NSSE abide by the Institutional Participation Agreement. The agreement outlines important IRB terms for recruiting and protecting study participants, cost information, and NSSE’s commitment to keeping institutional results confidential.
Click here to see NSSE’s official IRB documentation.
Access for Visually or Hearing Impaired Students
Indiana University’s Center for Survey Research (CSR), NSSE’s partner for survey implementation, strives to meet the standards of WCAG 1, WCAG 2, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Along with testing, CSR takes the survey using JAWS, one of the most used screen-reading assistive tools. In addition, NSSE staff are available Monday-Friday by phone to receive relay calls for hearing impaired students.
CSR scans the survey for accessibility issues using a variety of tools:
- The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
- SortSite 5
- aXe browser extension
- Google Chrome Accessibility Developer Tool
Data Security Practices
NSSE takes data security seriously. To understand the various ways NSSE ensures data security, see our responses to Educause's The Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Tool.
NSSE's Position on E.U. GDPR
NSSE generally does not direct its services to individuals in the European Union, and as a result, does not treat personal data from survey respondents as subject to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”). If an institutional contact (Campus Project Manager) wishes NSSE to survey a student population located in the European Union and/or serve as a processor under the GDPR, the request should be directed to the relevant NSSE Project Services team. NSSE may be able to comply with the GDPR in such a case, but additional procedures will be required, and NSSE may need to charge additional fees. For more information about the GDPR and IU’s current compliance efforts, click here.
