Campus Council mulled an impending campus-wide survey to assess residential life at its meeting Thursday. The survey, coordinated by Nicole Manley, assistant dean of students, will collect data to help Campus Council form policy.
“We put a new emphasis on looking at the type of experience you have residentially,” Manley said. “We want it to be very simple—nothing more than 25 or 30 questions.”
Manley added that the results of the questionnaire will not be published, owing to restrictions on releasing data from research involving human subjects at Duke. The results will go to Campus Council in order to help it shape resolutions with a better sense of its constituents’ attitudes about residential issues.
“We don’t have a 100 percent hit rate with our recommendations,” said senior Anthony Vitarelli, president of Campus Council. “This only makes our recommendations have more credibility.”
The two main thrusts of the discussion were the actual questions to be asked and the overall focus and philosophy of the survey. Various ideas for the format of the questionnaire included tabling on the Bryan Center walkway, sending a mass e-mail to all campus residents and creating a website. These last two methods were used by Duke Student Government in its “Visions of Duke” survey, which yielded results about student life last fall. Vitarelli lauded that effort but laid out different goals for Campus Council’s own project.
“Visions of Duke was great, but it was strictly qualitative,” he said. “Some of the key to this would be to have hard, quantitative data.”
This data will be gathered by means of several questions. Campus Council members suggested some be open-ended and others be answered along a gradient. Council members emphasized the need to strike a balance between questions that would yield detailed written answers from a few students and questions that would lead to a greater numbers of participants.
“Selection bias is going to exist no matter [how] you do it,” Vitarelli noted.
Proposed questions ranged from “Do you know what the quad model is?” to “Do you live in a dingy residence hall or a place you can identify as home?”
Council members also suggested other topics for inquiry, including hot-button issues such as campus safety and alcohol policy enforcement.
“Let’s do something that gets a perspective of residential life and see what we can do with it,” said sophomore Ben Rubinfeld, at-large representative.
In other business:
The meeting also addressed a Homecoming Weekend effort to get various student groups to paint benches for a contest that would be judged by President Richard Brodhead. All benches would then either be donated to local schools or installed on campus. Some council members expressed confusion as to whether the administration still allowed benches on the Main West Quadrangle, but Vitarelli reiterated their importance as a gathering place for students.
“I have been and will continue to encourage quad presidents to build benches on the Main Quad,” he said.
Campus Council also addressed the upcoming Devil’s Eve celebration, in which games and bands will be on the Main Quad during Parent’s Weekend. The group is attempting to finalize dining, promotional and programming decisions for the carnival, which will feature student musical, dancing and comedy groups.
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