We figured that the privacy of an anonymous survey would allow students to express themselves most freely about the most important issues on campus. We hoped some real truth would lie in the aggregate.

We started by independently designing a list of topics and questions we most wanted to know more about. We then contracted professional survey researchers at MSU’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, who helped make sure we were posing questions in a scientifically sound way, not leading respondents in any direction.

We chose not to go through the university’s official process for sending surveys to students. That would have allowed us to use MSU’s email system to distribute the survey, but would have involved university administrators approving our questions. We decided that conflicted with our independent mission and opted to distribute the survey ourselves instead.

We used a list of students’ names and cell phone numbers obtained through public records requests (this is considered “directory information" in Michigan and thus not protected by federal privacy laws). We hired a vendor to send automated texts to every student on the list, containing a brief explanation of the survey and a link to the form. We incentivized participation with a raffle of basketball tickets and gift cards.

Though the responses were anonymous, we did collect MSU NetIDs as a way of verifying that all the respondents were actually students and that no one had filled it out more than once. It also allowed us to award the incentives. The identifying data was removed from the final dataset. 

The final sample of 800 current students is not without a flaw. Though our respondents closely reflected MSU’s student body in terms of gender and race, they were more likely to be upperclassmen and graduate students than underclassmen. So, the findings may disproportionately represent the opinions of those students.

We again contracted the researchers at the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research to assist us in analyzing and interpreting the data. They generated spreadsheets with the findings presented numerically, which our newsroom then transformed into a series of stories and data visualizations.