Part-time Students And part-time Study In Higher ... - Universities UK

surveys the data is not able to inform us as to who were genuine student respondents and whichwere test interviews, for example completed by the project team.Nevertheless, the pilot did provide some useful feedback in terms of minor amendments to thequestionnaire, particularly for reducing its length.The pilot stage of the research was conducted between 31 October and 17 November 2005.9.4 FieldworkFollowing some questionnaire amendments the final online questionnaire was launched on 24November 2005.The cut-off date for survey completions from students was 15 January 2006. As is often the casewith self-completion surveys, respondents will either complete the survey as soon as they aremade aware of it or not do it at all. Given the low response rate, HEIs also sent students betweentwo and three reminders, to encourage participation amongst those who were either previously notinterested or had simply forgotten.A total of 2654 interviews were achieved, 2470 amongst students studying at an HEI and theremaining 184 at a further education college that was affiliated to an HEI.HEI’s informed GfK NOP of the number of emails they had sent out, but we have no means ofknowing how many of these were current addresses, or were email addresses that students everlooked at. For this reason any calculation of response rates based on these figures cannot bewholly reliable, and will certainly be an underestimate, but we cannot be sure by how much.Response rates for the survey varied significantly across the 25 participating HEIs, as detailed inTable A1. The response rates ranged from 23.5 per cent to 0.1 per cent. There was no obviouspattern to these response rates except they were above average at the two Scottish HEIs in thesample. Although the samples achieved at some institutions were extremely small (eg, twointerviews from City University and five from University of Portsmouth), given that these HEIs wereincluded in the original list of HEIs selected, we decided to keep them in the overall sample ofinterviews achieved, however, they inevitably bring down the average response rate.To help boost the response rate the length of time the survey was in the field was extended, andadditional reminders were sent out by the HEIs. It was not possible, however, to give a financialincentive mid-way through the fieldwork because of legislation affecting such incentives.Part-time students and part-time study: Strand 3 Universities UK 82