Survey Anonymity and Confidentiality
The Office of Institutional Research regards the confidentiality of survey data to be of utmost importance. Below is a description of an Anonymous Survey and a Confidential Survey.
Anonymous Surveys
We want to assure you that your responses to anonymous surveys are completely anonymous. Responses to anonymous surveys cannot be traced back to the respondent. No personally identifiable information is captured unless you voluntarily offer personal or contact information in any of the comment fields. Additionally, your responses are combined with those of many others and summarized in a report to further protect your anonymity.
Please note that if your response indicates a violation of Baylor University's Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Interpersonal Violence Policy, your response will be forwarded to the Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX Office.
Our office uses Qualtrics to administer surveys. For anonymous surveys, we utilize the “Anonymizing Responses” option. The following is paraphrased from the Qualtrics website:
Anonymizing responses is an effective way to permanently scrub a response of identifying information before saving it in the data.
Anonymized responses gathered with an Anonymous or Individual Link do not include the respondents’ IP address or location data in the results. Additionally, responses gathered with an Individual Link are disconnected from the contact who submitted the response. This option allows for reminders to be sent to those who have not responded while removing the identification of the respondent from the results.
Confidential Surveys
Confidential surveys collect personally identifiable information that may be combined with existing data in Baylor University databases for further analysis. No personally identifiable information will be reported back to the requestor unless you voluntarily offer personal or contact information in any of the comment fields. Additionally, your responses are combined with those of many others and summarized in a report to further protect your anonymity.
Please note that if your response indicates a violation of Baylor University's Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Interpersonal Violence Policy, your response will be forwarded to the Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX Office and they may contact you.