Metrics of student dissatisfaction and disagreement

Longitudinal explorations of a national survey instrument

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21324352
AutoresA Mark Langan (0000-0002-0482-1987, Manchester Metropolitan University, autor de correspondencia), W E Harris (0000-0002-9038-8656, Harper Adams University)
Año2024
Volumen87
Número2
Páginas249-269
Fecha de publicación2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHigher Education (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-1560 • E-ISSN: 1573-174X
EditorialSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s10734-023-01004-0
PMID37362752
OpenAlexW4361298479
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas67

This study explores dissatisfaction and neutrality metrics from 12 years of a national-level undergraduate student survey. The notion of dissatisfaction is much less prevalent in the narratives surrounding student survey outcomes, and the underpinning metrics are seldom considered. This is despite an increasingly vociferous debate about ‘value for money’ of higher education and the positioning of students as consumers in a marketised sector. We used machine learning methods to explore over 2.7 million national survey outcomes from 154 institutions to describe year-on-year stability in the survey items that best predicted dissatisfaction and neutrality, together with their similarity to known metric predictors of satisfaction. The widely publicised annual increases in student ‘satisfaction’ are shown to be the result of complex reductions in the proportions of disagreement and neutrality across different survey dimensions. Due to the widespread use of survey metrics in university league tables, we create an anonymised, illustrative table to demonstrate how UK institutional rankings would have differed if dissatisfaction metrics had been the preferred focus for reporting. We conclude by debating the tensions of balancing the provision of valuable information about dissatisfaction, with perpetuating negative impacts that derive from this important subset of the survey population

Business · Demographic economics · Economic growth · Economics · Higher education · League table · Metric (unit) · Neutrality · Political science · Population · Sociology · Statistics · Survey data collection · Survey instrument · Applied Psychology · Customer Service Quality and Loyalty · Demography · Evaluation of Teaching Practices · Higher Education Research Studies · Marketing · Psychology