In 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice and the White House encouraged colleges to begin administering climate surveys. While there is no federal mandate, some states, including New York, require colleges to administer climate surveys.
Climate surveys serve as an important tool for institutions to monitor sexual and interpersonal violence on their campuses. It can also provide the institution insight into the effectiveness of their prevention and response programming. However, many institutions face several barriers to administering climate surveys, including low response rate and lack of resources to hire a third party to administer the survey.
The Implementing Campus Climate Surveys: A Step-by-Step How-to Guide aims to address these barriers by providing step-by-step explanations of how to develop, administer, and analyze climate surveys. The climate survey process is broken into five steps:
In each step we share best-practices and available resources to effectively and efficiently administer surveys on your campus. Along the way we provide examples and lessons-learned from the SUNY Sexual Violence Prevention Climate Survey.
This How-to Guide along with other useful resources, such A Guide to Climate Assessment from Rutgers School of Social Work and the Administrator Information Packet from the Office of Violence Against Women, help to break down what can feel like an overwhelming process of implementing campus climate surveys.