EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

66 Equality Guide
remarks were about the contents of the questions. A few respondents stated that
they were curious about the results.
! Negative remarks about services, initiatives or personnel at the VUB: 13 students
made remarks about services that do not work well or about professors who are not
sympathetic enough.
! Anecdotes: a few respondents used the open questions to tell a (personal) anecdote
that had to do with diversity.
! Respondents who give their definition of diversity: 2 respondents gave their own
definition of diversity. “For me, diversity entails that everyone gets along with each
other without problems and without the difference being notable”. “Tolerance and
the possibility to discuss everything”.
When the correlations between the different parts were analysed, we could see
quite a positive correlation between the two attitude parts (* = 0.543, p < 0.001).
There is also a smaller positive correlation between well-being and climate (* = 0.351,
p < 0.001). The other correlations are below * = 0.2.
Conclusions
The results described cannot be generalized to the whole student population since only
16% of students completed the survey. This low response percentage may imply that
students are not interested in the subjects of diversity and equal opportunities.
Parallels are found between the results of students and personnel. Their feeling of wellbeing
seems to be the same and students who report discrimination and such feel less
good than those who do not. Concerning the reporting of discrimination and the like,
we noticed that language also plays a role in this. It may indicate that language is an
issue. A positive signal is that a large majority of the students find the language lessons
important to very important. Another parallel with personnel is that the target groups of
projects and initiatives consider these projects very important.
It seems that students do not always have an opinion, even if it is about matters that
concern them. This was expressed in the parts where attitudes were measured and in
the part about services for students, where sometimes up to 28% did not answer the
question. On the other hand, a lot of suggestions were made in the open questions,
which shows that the respondents are concerned about this subject. Personnel tended
to give more criticism than real suggestions for improvement.
4.3. Academic staff at two foreign universities
Part one (about organizational climate) of the personnel survey was tested at the universities
of our transnational project partners in the UK and Spain. The validation of
the scales by means of factor analysis has been explained earlier. The survey was completed
by 252 respondents. It is not known to how many persons the link to the survey