About the First-Year Survey

Most of you will remember taking a survey during orientation. The 2004 survey (for the class of 2008) was particularly interesting in that it included not just the standard questions, but a variety of questions on beliefs and values. We will be working with those data. To protect confidentiality, identifying questions have been removed.

This is a census of the students for the year in question, but, according to the person doing Institutional Research at the time, a single year can be viewed as a sample because the results are quite consistent from year to year, in the short term, at least. For the purposes of practice with inferential data analysis, we will treat this as a SRS from all recent Grinnell Students.

You should remember that these data were provided to us as a privilege for use in a scholarly way, which we must not abuse by sensationalizing findings or otherwise misusing the data. If you are not sure how certain questions were put into columns or how things were coded, just ask.