After being temporarily sidelined by questions of legality and privacy, the Duke Student Government Research Unit is back on its feet.
The unit—founded last semester—began with a set of six topics to study, assigned by the DSG Senate. But administrators' concerns about students’ handling of confidential data and the difficulty of information acquisition led to a delay in DSGRU operations. After careful examination by the administration, however, the unit has official approval to conduct campus research.
The University did not let DSGRU begin its research immediately because administration wanted to solidify its institutional data policy under new Provost Sally Kornbluth, said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education.
“There were some legal issues and confidentiality issues that needed to be worked out,” said Nowicki. “Our new provost wanted to get together with various senior administrators to make sure that we had a full understanding of what the policies and practices needed to be, and that was organized when DSGRU requested some data in December. There are institutional data that we don’t have the legal right to reveal, and there are also privacy issues with institutional data."
DSGRU Director Kshipra Hemal, a junior, noted that DSGRU makes sure to comply with all of the University's rules on data gathering.
“There are a variety of concerns associated with collecting data on students,” Hemal wrote in an email Tuesday. “That's why we made it a point to comply with all of the Institutional Review Board’s requirements necessary for conducting research responsibly. Research conducted by DSGRU is being held to the same standard as any other research on campus.”
Nowicki noted that the institutional review board plays an essential role in regulating the publication of collected data. Part of the IRB's job is to ensure that all data from human subjects that could be publicly shared meets a number of standards—ensuring that individuals' privacy is protected and that they fully understand what they are consenting to when they participate in anything that could be construed as a study.
“To the extent that the DSGRU wanted to make data public, for example, in collaboration with faculty or for various research projects, they would have to be approved by the IRB,” Nowicki said.
There are six studies currently being undertaken by DSGRU—research into Student Organization Finance Committee funding, DSG demographics, the first-year food plan, the ongoing curriculum review, the independent housing model and selective living group and greek recruitment, Hemal said.
Because these research topics involve several sensitive topics—such as student finances—making sure that DSGRU's studies are conducted under IRB supervision and review is important to both the ethicality and the validity of the studies, she noted.
Hemal added that acquiring data was also a problem faced by DSGRU during its first attempts to do research.
“Since our research spans across many campus entities from the registrar's office to housing [and] dining, it was hard to come up with a coherent system for requesting data that applied to all the offices at Duke,” she wrote.
Shared interest in DSGRU studies between students and administrators will help the unit acquire its data in the future, Nowicki said.
“It’s great that students are interested in this range of issues, and the best way to do this is in partnership with the units which are doing this [research], which in general are interested in the same sort of issues,” Nowicki said. “Having student government interest in data analysis means that we can work in partnership with student government rather than be siloed separately.”
When DSGRU was founded by a DSG resolution in September, much of the dialogue centered on the need for DSG to have data backing their policies and decisions.
“There wasn’t enough data in everyday discussions which were based upon qualitative observations," junior Abhi Sanka, DSG's executive vice president, told The Chronicle in September. "We didn’t have reports behind the decisions we made and so I felt this void needed to be filled with a policy making process that included statistical evidence and data to make decisions."
Nowicki added that part of his role is to ensure that the research is conducted effectively with maximum collaboration between interested parties.
“The students' interest in [these studies] is overlapping with administrative interest across different units,” said Nowicki. “So part of my job in this is to do some air traffic control and get the DSGRU connected with the right unit that is interested in a particular issue.”
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