PAEA Policy Changes Make Data More Accessible and Useful

Over the past several months, PAEA’s Research Team has been working on changes to our data and reporting policies and practices in an effort to increase your access to useful data for benchmarking, evaluation, and original research. We are excited to share these changes with you.

Summary of Data Sharing Policy Changes

Following a review of comparable associations’ data sharing-policies, PAEA’s Board of Directors approved changes to the PAEA Data Sharing Policies and the Membership Policies and Procedures. This means that benchmarking data on student and faculty demographics will now be available to member programs. This includes providing program-level race and ethnicity data to PA education researchers for analysis. These changes, recommended by the Research MAC, demonstrate the Board’s commitment to identity diversity, as described in the 2017 PAEA Strategic Plan.

The first change classifies student and faculty race and ethnicity data as unrestricted data for publication, in an identifiable manner by programs and comparable to how the AAMC reports this data. The approved change is highlighted in italics below. (Note: The prior policy ended with the previous sentence.)

The second change clarifies the type of information considered sensitive, which cannot be reported or shared unless the aggregate data exceed four values. Prior to the change, the policy was ambiguous and stated that “some student demographics” would be considered sensitive information, and therefore any categories with fewer than five responses could not be reported or released to researchers. The policy was often interpreted to mean that race and ethnicity data were considered to be sensitive. The modified sentence is highlighted in italics below.

Importantly, this gives us the ability to release race and ethnicity data for subsets of programs with fewer than five values to institutional review board-approved researchers and in our reports.

New Student Demographics Report

These policy changes are being made to unchain PAEA’s data and allow it be used to its fullest potential. Accordingly, in winter 2018–2019, the PAEA Research Team will publish Student Demographics Report 1: PA Graduate Demographics by Program, 2017–2018. This report will contain tables — similar to the AAMC’s tables on race, ethnicity, and sex — summarizing graduate race, gender, ethnicity, and military status frequencies and percentages for each PAEA member program. For example, templates for the gender and ethnicity reports by program, organized by state, can be found here.

The report will only be available to PAEA member programs (individuals and entities not affiliated with PAEA will not be able to download this report). The data will be drawn from programs’ 2018 Program Survey responses. Context is important for this type of data, so each program will be profiled with local comparative race and ethnicity data so that readers will be able to compare the program’s race and ethnicity percentages with the program’s local area.
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Student Demographic Calculator

PAEA is also working both to increase the quality of student demographic data captured in the Annual Program Survey as well as make it easier for program directors to provide the data. The Research Team has developed student demographic calculators to help programs tabulate their students’ genders, ethnicities, races, and military statuses for reporting in the Program Report as well as in the Student Demographics Report 1: PA Graduate Demographics by Program, 2017–2018. 

We have made entering the data as easy as possible; programs can download their matriculants’ race, ethnicity, gender, and military status data from WebAdMIT, and then copy and paste them into each of the appropriate tabs in the spreadsheet. In order to make the student demographic calculators easy to use, we have developed a guide to walk you through the short process. For programs that do not use CASPA, we have provided a short, survey for students to complete and send back to you, which can then be entered into the calculator.–>

New Data Portal

When entering data into the 2018 Annual Program Survey, the interface will look a little different (and hopefully more user-friendly) this year. The 2018 Program Survey will be the first to be hosted in a new data portal that PAEA is building. The new survey will not require you to toggle through multiple pages and will allow you to save at any time without fear of data being lost. We believe this new survey delivery system will save you time and headaches in the survey completion process.

We are making this system responsive to your requests. For example, if you completed the 2017 Annual Program Survey last summer, several of the basic program data fields will be pre-filled with your responses from last year, only asking you to verify that the information has not changed. You will only need to enter information that is likely to change from year to year. Of course, if you’re a new PAEA member and have not completed the survey before, you will need to answer all questions.

In addition to increasing the ease of data entry, the new data portal also will function as a dashboard, hosting several comparative data-reporting features allowing you to compare your program’s data to national data as well as groups of programs of your choice. While this will not be available immediately, we will provide more details about the new reporting features as they are developed and go live.

Deadline and Questions

The 2018 Annual Program Survey opens Wednesday, July 18, and closes on Wednesday, September 19. Program directors will receive a link to the survey and will be free to distribute that to any of their faculty who are entered into the PAEA membership database. To prevent overwriting of data, only one person will be able to access each program’s survey at a time. More details will be available closer to launch. Please send questions to research@PAEAonline.org.