The Office of Institutional Research and Planning (OIRP) is available to help faculty and staff identify, locate or gather information for assessment and other research. In those cases where existing data is insufficient to answer a question, the OIRP has been designated as the central campus coordinating body for all Administrative and Academic Unit Support Surveys. This central coordination is important in order to minimize the survey burden on constituencies.
The OIRP adheres to the Human Subjects Protection Protocols used by Marist’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) and all proposed research studies involving human subjects are approved by them.
The Office primarily focuses on studies pertaining to the College’s effectiveness. As time allows, the Office may be available to assist with data gathering for faculty research. Generally, faculty are responsible for the design, IRB approval process, and data analysis phases of their research projects. For this type of project, the OIRP may act as a facilitator for data collection.
The consultation phase will help to clarify the purposes and outcomes of the requested study. A face-to-face meeting will be conducted between personnel from the OIRP and the requestor.
The meeting will accomplish three objectives:
In the study design phase, the OIRP will use the information from the consultation phase to create an appropriate study for the research question.
The typical timeframe for study design is 1 – 3 weeks. The timeframe depends on the complexity, type of study and the current workload of the office.
The representative from the OIRP will present a document to the requestor containing:
This initial document of understanding will be signed by the requestor and a representative of the OIRP.
All studies potentially involving human subjectst require Marist Institutional Review Board (IRB) review. The IRB is the final authority on whether or not a project requires their approval, and the research protocol should be forwarded to them as soon as possible for their approval. As long as there are no material changes to the research protocol, this document should be attached to the IRB form. Please contact Elizabeth Teed at extension 2458 for more information on IRB approval. Approval generally takes less than a week.
Upon receipt of the document of understanding and the IRB approval (if required) letter, the OIRP will begin implementing the protocol as approved.
In the cases where the study protocol includes a survey, IR will send either the paper based survey or a link to the web based survey to the involved parties for review. This review should take no longer than 1 week. The review is to make sure the survey contains all of the elements that were agreed upon in the design phase.
The final stage of survey design is a final check of the survey by IR. For a paper based survey, IR will double check for spelling errors and errors in wording. For web surveys, IR has a checklist to check spelling, scales, logic if there is programming, and general flow through the survey. No web survey will be launched until this check is complete. This process takes 1 day.
The OIRP will follow the protocol described in the document of understanding.
In some cases, the response rates for surveys will not yield a sufficient sample to get results that have an acceptable sampling error for the population of interest. Surveys may stay open past the scheduled dates if the response rate is lower than what is expected. If this is the case, in consultation with the requestor, the OIRP will undertake additional efforts to increase sample size.
The role of the OIRP in the data analysis will be specified in the document of understanding.
In some cases, the OIRP will simply be providing data to the researcher.
In the majority of cases, the OIRP will provide a written report meeting the specifications in the document of understanding.
The analysis will be determined on a case-by-case basis and will take between 1 and 2 weeks depending on the complexity of the research study.
