About SRC

Located in the Laramie Plains Civic Center, the Survey Research Center (SRC) is a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences and a resource of the entire University. In cooperation with the Statistical Consulting Center, the SRC serves UW, the city of Laramie, other localities, the state of Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountain region.

Formally established as a separate unit in 1989, but with experience in survey research since the 1970's, the Center has facilities and staff dedicated to quality work. Services include research design, scientific sampling, crafting and fine tuning questionnaires, testing and validating questionnaires, conducting surveys in various formats, and statistical data analysis. The SRC is organized to meet the needs of state and local governments, faculty researchers, students, campus offices and organizations, policy-makers, non-profit agencies, and private businesses.

The SRC is currently staffed with a Director, a Manager, an Information Specialist, and an Information Technology Developer. In addition, the SRC employs student interns and maintains a pool of over 50 trained interviewers on part-time schedules.

Telephone interviews are conducted on Computer-Aided Telephone Interviewing (CATI) call stations, giving the Center the capacity to manage multiple simultaneous surveys. For household surveys, most calling is done in the early evening, Sunday through Thursday. For employer surveys, calls are made during business hours, up to seven days per week. In addition, mail-out and door-to-door surveys are conducted, as are focus group interviews and e-mail questionnaires.

In all its work, the SRC and its staff adhere to the Code of Professional Ethics and Practices of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). In particular, the confidentiality of respondent information is closely guarded.

Reliability of SRC operations is supported by an organizational commitment to quality control, by the use of modern CATI software and redundant hardware. Data and system backups are performed on a regular basis.

WinCati and QPL software are currently used for conducting telephone surveys. In addition state of the art Remark OMR (by Principia) scanning software is used for data entry on mail questionnaires. The main application used for statistical data analysis is the SPSS software package. Ocasionally the SAS software is used. The results of a survey can be provided as a raw data file (in Excel, SPSS ASCII, or other formats); as a basic statistical report showing response percentages; or as a more elaborate narrative report with cross-tabulations, multivariate analyses, and graphs. Professional briefings tailored to diverse audiences (top management, constituents, etc.) may also be arranged.