Date: May 15, 2000

ATTN: David Frank, Chair FAC & Peter Gilkey, President, UO Faculty Senate

RE: University of Oregon Survey of Non-Instructional Faculty (Officers of Administration and Officers of Research

Gentlemen -

I am writing to express my concerns regarding the OSRL designed survey referenced above I believe that the design of the study is seriously flawed, and that those flaws will taint any response to both the written instrument and the phone survey. My principle concern lies with the conflict between the cover letter statement promising anonymity and the questions asked in section D. In addition to concerns about the printed survey, as a phone survey participant, I can attest that phone staff were unable to clearly define privacy protections, and that many of the questions asked were the section D questions which would identify me personally.

The cover letter states:

`...this survey is ANONYMOUS: no one will ever be able to connect your name or your department with your answers."

(emphasis OSRL's)

While the questions in section D would clearly allow pin-point identification of individual employees (year of employment?, which VP do you report to?, what unit, department, or college are you in? what is your current job category?, how old are you? are you male or female?, what is your race or ethnicity?, Are you... veteran - disabled - heterosexual -parent or guardian of a minor child - a resident alien). In many cases, you wouldn't even need BANNER access to identify a particular person in a small unit.

What I'm objecting to here is NOT the extreme selectivity of the data, but the promise of anonymity which is clearly disingenuous.

It would have been a relatively simple matter to design a two part survey instrument that allowed respondents to submit indentifing data (section D) separately from the rest of the questions. HR does this now with affirmative action data collected with job applications. If anonymity was not intended, then subjects should have been warned that honest answers would provide indentifing data.

I believe that the failure to provide adequate privacy protections, and the transparent nature of the personal data collected, have effectively tainted the survey results. I know a number of people who either will not return the survey, or who will self-edit their responses because of these design flaws.

I realize that it is probably to late to deal with the issue of tainted responses, but I urge you to ask OSRL to take steps to separate the A/B/C response data from the D section data and I would suggest that you take all results of these survey with a grain or more of salt.

Thank you for your consideration in this matter,

Lucy E. Lynch Academic User Support Computing Center University of Oregon llynch@darkwing.uoregon.edu (541) 346-1774