SERVICES WE OFFER
The Office of Institutional Research provides a range of services, including the following:
Data Requests. If you need data that isn’t available on our dashboards, please complete the Data and Research Request form. We ask that you give our office at least two weeks to fulfill the request. Requests that are more complex may require more time. If that’s the case, a member of our office will contact you and discuss the timeline for completion.
Surveys. Our IR staff can help you with developing, administering, and analyzing surveys, and we can provide support and guidance regarding how best to communicate the results. If you are interested in using an external survey instrument, we can help you determine which one(s) to use, and our office can serve as the point of contact with external parties. Please note that we get many requests to develop and administer surveys. If we have multiple surveys running, we may suggest that you delay your survey in order to minimize survey fatigue among our students and employees.
Qualitative Research. While survey research can provide us with useful data about large groups of people, sometimes it’s helpful to get more focused and nuanced information using qualitative approaches, such as focus groups or interviews. Our office can provide guidance and support for these research efforts. Additionally, the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) provides a Focus Group Toolkit and a Focus Group Guide that are good resources for this kind of research.
Program Review and Evaluation. Our IR team provides assistance with instructional and non-instructional PPAs, evaluations of college processes and governance structures, and SLO and SAO assessment. We also assist with college and program accreditation efforts.
Professional Development and Data Coaching. We offer workshops, webinars, drop-in sessions, and individual appointments to help you become more comfortable with data, and to analyze and use student data to inform your equity and student success efforts. Specifically, we help guide data-informed decision-making by helping you ask the right questions, identifying the data needed to answer those questions, and accessing the various types of available data.
External Research. Hartnell College supports faculty, staff or external parties who would like to conduct studies with Hartnell student or employee populations. In order to protect research participants, while supporting faculty or administrators to achieve their academic goals, we ask all interested candidates to submit the following to our Director of Institutional Research (mangelova@hartnell.edu):
- Our Dissertations/Research Projects form.
- IRB approval from host institution (or documentation indicating exempt status)
- Informed consent form
- All research instruments to be used, such as survey instruments, focus group or interview protocols, etc.
We will review your materials and respond within two weeks after submission. If your proposal is accepted, we ask that you share the final results with the college once your research is completed.
Data sharing agreements. Our work with external partners may require developing a data sharing agreement. When
a need for a data-sharing agreement is identified, please contact the Vice President
of Institutional Equity, Effectiveness, and Success to discuss whether the Office
of Institutional Research should be involved in the development of the agreement.
We can then connect with the external partner.
Once the agreement has been drafted, it should be routed using Adobe Sign to the following
people for review:
- Feasibility: Director of Institutional Research
- Data security review: Vice President of Information Technology
- Legal compliance: initial review by Vice President of Administrative Services, legal counsel if deemed necessary by VPA
- The data-sharing agreement should be signed by an authorized signer.
Once the data-sharing agreement has been executed, the agreement will be housed in the Office of Administrative Services, and a copy will be housed in the Office of Institutional Research.