SELFS Administration
Administration Overview
Review the general timeline and key aspects of administration
Schools that have been selected to participate in the pilot year of the SELFS study should review the following information related to survey administration.
- In fall/spring law schools will be selected to participate in the SELFS pilot. Only 20 law schools will be selected in the inaugural year.
- Selected law schools will register and provide LSSSE staff with administration contacts and agree to the Terms of Participation.
- In the spring, each law school provides the names and email addresses of its law school faculty and student-facing staff.
- Customization options include options for delivery of recruitment and reminder emails and a selection of administration schedules.
- Faculty and staff responses are confidential to their law school.
- Before LSSSE staff send recruitment and reminder messages to participate in the surveys, institutions should prepare for their administration by sending pre-survey announcements and checking in with their IT team.
- SELFS is administered in the spring semester.
- The dean at participating law schools will receive interactive dashboard reports and a data analysis tool after the survey administration closes.
Study #23202 | IRB Approval Date: August 22, 2024
Confidentiality
Find details about how we maintain respondent confidentiality
A common inquiry from participating law schools focuses on the confidential nature of SELFS survey responses. The short answer is that responses to the survey are confidential to law school. LSSSE staff ensure that respondents can be confident that their responses are not individually identifiable.
The process is similar to the LSSSE survey. In preparation for sending the survey invitation, follow-up, and reminder e-mails, LSSSE staff assign a survey identification number, called surveyID, to all participants in order to track responses. This surveyID connects names and email addresses during the survey administration. This link allows us to report institution-level response rates and to discontinue contacting those who complete the survey or decline participation. LSSSE staff will never report individual information, such as which individuals have or have not responded, to participating institutions.
When data collection is complete, identifying information (respondent names and email addresses) is not included with the respondent data. LSSSE staff then analyze the data and create individual institutional reports. Each participating law school receives their data via an electronic dashboard and data analysis tool.
Sixty days after survey administration closes, LSSSE staff will destroy names and email addresses in respondent information to further ensure that respondent identities will not be compromised. The respondent database is permanent, but this does not contain information that would allow respondents to be identified once the sampling files have been destroyed.
Please direct any other questions about SELFS or SELFS survey respondent confidentiality to lssse@iu.edu