EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

Chapter 1 ! Personnel development and organisational culture 51
3.7.10. Processing the open question(s)
An open question was inserted in the survey in which the respondents were asked if
they had comments about the diversity policy at the VUB or about the survey. This
information was processed by dividing the answers into different categories. Every
remark was given a number (or even more than one number). Each number represented
a different category that arises as new subjects/categories in the remarks are
found. Examples of categories are: comments on the survey, positive comments about
diversity and initiatives, negative or critical comments about diversity and initiatives,
suggestions, etc.
Give incentives?
We thought students would intrinsically be less motivated than personnel to fill in the questionnaire
. Consequently we decided to provide them with incentives in the form of movie tickets.
Forty persons could win two tickets if they filled in the survey completely. However, response
remained lower than the personnel response and more than 400 responses had to be deleted
because they were not complete. We supposed that the incentives motivated students to start
the survey without being attractive enough to make them go through the whole survey. Whether
or not to give incentives depends on several factors:
! What are the characteristics of the group you want to question? What kind of incentive
would they be interested in?
! How strongly motivated are the respondents?
! What is the available budget for incentives?
3.8. Validating the scales in the UK and Spain
The scales from part one, organizational climate, were tested by transnational project
partners in Bradford, UK, and Valencia, Spain 71 . The survey ran on the server in Belgium
so data and potential issues could easily be monitored and controlled. Both
groups (UK and Spain) were taken together (N = 206) to perform a factor analysis.
The results are shown in table 8 below. The third column indicates on which factor the
item/variable was loaded in the Belgian testing of the survey.
We notice that the factors do not all correspond to the factors found in the Belgian
survey. For some variables, the factor loadings are too small to be displayed (they
should be at least over 0.3 to have a good loading). Still, we can distinguish patterns of
items that are grouped together in the same way as in the Belgian tests, which indicates
a certain validity (it measures what it is meant to measure). It is of course very difficult
to reach 100% validity with a concept as abstract as diversity. The instrument should
be tested in two different organizations: one that is totally receptive to diversity and one
71
Generalidad Valenciana, Conselleria de Economia, Hacienda y empleo-direccion GE; UK Resource
Centre for Women in SET.