Design, Run, and Interpret Survey-Based Research in the Fields of Academic Integrity and Misconduct

Academic integrity is a challenging subject to study using surveys. The findings can be influenced by multiple factors: who completed the surveys, were they representative of the target population, what they are asked, when, why, and how. Participants are concerned about the safety and security of their responses and normally have limited incentives to participate in the first place. This chapter provides pragmatic guidance about how to undertake survey-based research in the field of academic integrity, with a focus on questionnaires. The guidance is intended to be useful for anyone wanting to read and understand survey-based research that is published in the field of academic integrity or who wants to run their own survey. A guiding principle is that academic integrity is important for any and every discipline in academia. Yet most academics do not receive formal training in social science research methods, and so this chapter provides very basic principles. The emphasis is on conducting questionnaire-based research in higher education, but the principles apply to the interpretation and review of surveys conducted by others and in any demographic group. It is apparent from the literature that very many survey studies in the field of academic integrity use a similar methodology (convenience or snowball samples, with limited considerations of how representative the sample is and little or no validity testing). These approaches can be inclusive, in that they can be relatively cheap and straightforward to undertake. However, the quality of data derived from these approaches can be substantially improved by the application of some general principles of rigorous survey design; these are the pragmatic focus of this chapter.