FAQs

We recommend launching the survey August through November or January through early May. We most likely can accommodate your quick turn-around; however, there are two stages that clients might need more time than they expect. First, the PACE team requires a completed service agreement to start work. Institutions may need to run this service agreement by their legal department. Institutions may also like to form a taskforce to develop custom questions. The second stage where clients might need more time — developing custom questions and providing a contact list.

Clients may add up to 20 custom questions that begin with “The extent to which…”. In addition, clients may also include up to 3 custom demographic questions.

We recommend leaving the survey open for a minimum of three weeks in order to gather as many responses as possible.

We generally send out three reminders in the duration of three weeks when the survey is open in order to encourage participation. The reminders will only be sent to those who have not completed the survey. Respondents who complete the survey will not receive reminders.

Encourage the President or other member of your institution’s leadership team to send an email to participants prior to the email distribution of the survey to notify them that they will be receiving an email from PACE staff and to stress the importance of completing the survey. Our emails are sent from pace_survey@ncsu.edu. Also, we highly encourage marketing the survey among participants in as many ways as possible in order to get the best response rate (i.e. announcements at meetings, flyers on bulletin boards, etc.)

Your responses are confidential but not anonymous. PACE staff will not report whether or not you take the survey; however, each invitee has a unique link to access the survey. Your answers are completely confidential and will be released only as summaries in which no individual’s answers can be identified. When you submit your survey your name will be deleted from the mailing list and never connected to your answers in any way.

Any variable with a response rate of less than 7 respondents will be excluded from the data provided to the institution to protect the confidentiality of respondents. In addition, specific answers, such as your date of birth, are coded into year ranges (e.g. If you answer that you were born in 1980, you will be coded as a participant who is age 40-49.)

Open-ended comments are separated from all other survey items including demographic questions and “the extent to which…” items. The institution will receive open-ended comments in the aggregate. There will be no way to connect comments to respondents. Additionally, PACE staff review the comments and edit as necessary to maintain respondent confidentiality.

Yes, the Part-time Faculty question set would only be administered to part-time faculty while all other question sets would be administered to all staff.

Historically, institutions score lowest on the institutional structure climate factor of the standard PACE. As a result, we developed the Institutional Structure question set to delve deeper into these issues. The questions on the Institutional Structure question set center around: mission, leadership, decision-making and influence, policies and structural organization, teams and cooperation, and communication and information sharing.

The PACE Survey team does not think a comparison between two administrations more than five years apart is meaningful.

In the report, you can select three comparison dimensions from our norm base. Most institutions will select their previous administration, the entire PACE normbase, and institutions of a similar size. When you select a Carnegie, IPEDS, or Census classification, your institution is already classified in each category by the information provided by your institutional research team. As a result, your comparison group for the Carnegie, IPEDS, or Census classification will be your institution’s classification. For example, if you are a medium sized institution, then you will be compared to other medium sized institutions.

PACE survey responses are completely confidential and will be released only as summaries in which no individual’s answers can be identified. Any results from demographic categories with fewer than seven respondents will automatically be redacted. No personalized information including, but not limited to, email addresses and IP addresses, will be reported to your institution. Any phrasing or sentences in the open-ended responses that name individuals or may reveal the identity of the survey respondent will be removed.