Student Interviews & Focus Groups

Each year, a few departments commission us to conduct interviews or focus groups with their students. If you are considering inviting us to do this, know that…

We take care of everything. We will invite students to participate and provide incentives if necessary. We will conduct the interviews and/or focus groups using our own questions (see, for example our senior exit interview question bank) or questions that departments select. We will record and transcribe each conversation and use the transcriptions to write a final, qualitative report covering major themes that emerged.

We protect your department or program’s confidentiality. We will send the report we generate only to the department or program chair who commissioned it. The chair can then decide with whom else s/he would like to share it. We will not release this report to anyone else, including those in Academic Affairs, to whom our office reports.

We protect students’ confidentiality. We will ask students participating in the process to sign consent forms that have been approved by Wesleyan’s Institutional Review Board. These consent forms contain a promise of confidentiality for their participation.