LIS Postgraduate Survey March 2004

Background to survey Postgraduates last surveyed in May 2000 Undergraduates surveyed Spring 2002 Identifies needs of postgraduate students Informs continuous improvement of LIS services

What did we want to find out? How can LIS improve our services to assist you in your studies?

Creation of questionnaire Some consistency with previous postgraduate survey to build up trends. Highest priority items in paired comparison analysis from previous survey. Input from LIS staff to include items of current interest and known issues. Questionnaire kept to 15 minutes completion time. Web version only. The survey used paired comparisons at the end of the questionnaire. Each item appears 3 times opposite other items and respondents are asked to choose which of the pair is most important to them. The software package which analyses the responses then ranks them in order of relative importance. There was only a web version as over ¾ of responses in undergraduate survey were via web.

Response rate Email alert sent to all postgraduates = 1467 (excluding those students writing-up) Publicity campaign to raise awareness of survey Prize draw as incentive Email reminder sent to taught students 241 questionnaires completed = 16% of population Similar to response rate for undergraduate survey in 2002

Response by school LES 28 = 13% of school ABS 128 = 16% of school LHS 34 = 17% of school EAS 51 = 19% of school Fairly good spread across the schools, with LES being slightly under-represented. Small sample sizes have meant that results have not been analysed at school level.

Response by taught / research Taught 141 = 12% of population Research 94 = 28% of population Remaining 6 were writing-up Only 25 of the respondents were distance learners. Views of research students are over-represented in the survey. We should bear this in mind when interpreting results.

Use back button to return to contents page Computer use 86% of respondents had the use of a computer with internet access at their usual term-time address. This is encouraging and compares very favourably with the results from the undergraduate survey two years ago when less than half undergraduates had access to the internet from their term-time address. It is clear from other comments in the survey that configuring home computers to access some of our e-journals from off-campus is a problem for some. Information is currently provided on the web but we will make this more prominent. Use back button to return to contents page