Mentor Involvement Survey

[Kevin Leonard]

Hi everyone!
I'm doing a research paper for my freshman writing seminar on robotics mentorship. The key things I'm trying to figure out and write about are what gets mentors involved with robotics, and what keeps them involved for years to come.
It is mainly targeted at FRC mentorship, but I tried to make the survey applicable to mentors of all educational robotics competitions.

If you are a mentor, and you are reading this, I would appreciate it if you filled out this short survey: http://goo.gl/forms/x3iRUxGmt7
It's not particularly long, but it would greatly help me with my project.

Thank you very much! :)

[Libby K]

Filled! :)

[Thad House]

Done!

[The_ShamWOW88]

Submitted!! Good luck with your project!

[AdamHeard]

Would you be willing to share the results when finished?

[rwood359]

Would you be willing to share the results when finished?
Submitted and I second that.

[Kevin Leonard]

Would you be willing to share the results when finished?

I'm not sure. I don't necessarily want to reveal everyone's personal motivations for joining robotics to everyone else without their express permissions, but the information is also unlikely to be particularly sensitive information, so I should be able to.
We'll see when I'm all done- I have to get some non-CD people to fill out the survey as well, or there will be an inherent bias of who is filling out my survey.

I would like to thank the 91 people who already filled out my survey just from seeing it on ChiefDelphi, and also RoboticsMemes on Facebook for advertising it as well: https://www.facebook.com/RoboMemes.

[techhelpbb]

You have survey enjoy your statistics exercise :)

[Calvin Hartley]

Submitted! I too would like to see the results when you are finished.

[Katie_UPS]

An easy way to not reveal potentially sensitive information is to not release any names/team numbers and then categorize responses such that the data is more generic. Unfortunately that means you have to parse through all the data by hand, but I feel like you might be doing that anyways.

[kstl99]

Done and good luck at RIT where my daughter is going.

[nfhammes]

Seconding Katie: releasing either interpreted data (charts, graphs, etc) or a CSV with the personally-identifiable information scrubbed could be interesting/useful for others.

[feverittm]

You could post the aggregated results. Show the percentages should not disclose any personal information.

[IronicDeadBird]

An easy way to not reveal potentially sensitive information is to not release any names/team numbers and then categorize responses such that the data is more generic. Unfortunately that means you have to parse through all the data by hand, but I feel like you might be doing that anyways.

Or include a question on the form that says if you are okay with your results being open to public or not.

[Kevin Leonard]

Or include a question on the form that says if you are okay with your results being open to public or not.

It's a little late for that one with over 100 responses submitted.

I think I'm going to go through the data and release some sort of aggregate results at least. But that's when I'm finished, and that's a little while from now.

[Kevin Leonard]

Some of these are absolutely inspiring to read. But a few are also very personal. I might PM a few of these individuals personally before releasing some of the responses, even if they're all mixed up.

[216Robochick288]

I just submitted mine. Please let me know if you need anything clarified. My history coaching is long, despite how young I am and how few years I have in the program.

Also, on the note of publishing stuff, I would be curious to see the hours put in, its nothing personal about it and I think the stats would be cool to see.

[MamaSpoldi]

Done.

I agree it would be interesting to see the motivations of others who are involved.

[216Robochick288]

Also, I posted this thread in FIRST Ladies and FIRST Alumni! I wish you lots of wonderful responses.

[IronicDeadBird]

It's a little late for that one with over 100 responses submitted.

I think I'm going to go through the data and release some sort of aggregate results at least. But that's when I'm finished, and that's a little while from now.

Guess I will just have to be quicker on the draw next time. Locked one in and sent it out. Keep us posted!

[Richard Wallace]

Done. I hope you will share a summary. Feel free to use any part of my responses.

BTW, this is a well designed survey.

[tr6scott]

Done.

[Seth Mallory]

Done. Posting summary a would be great.

[RoboChair]

Done.

[Kevin Leonard]

Wow. Over 150 responses, and they're all unique and have their own stories.

This might take awhile, guys, but thank you VERY much for participating.

Beyond my research project, this could make for some very cool information in other ways.

I'll let you all know when I have this all processed- and I am still accepting responses. I don't want to only get the first 5 hours of responses- that would present an inherent bias, so keep them coming!

[Foster]

Done!

Good luck on the data!

I didn't put the hours in reading CD, that would be a three digit number most weeks during build :-)

[snoman]

submitted

[dag0620]

Submitted. Looking forward to seeing the data once released!

[tcjinaz]

This was fun, since after the last FRC season I was pinged to take a survey from a group loosely associated with AZ FIRST. I answered as best I could, but it was really oriented to teachers (there are teams with no teachers (Hi Caution!)) and parents. I chewed on the person who pushed the survey and she sounded like she clued in a bit.
Thanks, a pure Mentor survey. The time spent statistics will be fun all by themselves.
Tim

[Blake B]

This is a great idea and a great project. I would love to see the results of this if you and various people's responses are willing to be shared.

[seg9585]

Thanks for offering up the survey. OP, I am very familiar with your high school team (Team 20) since I was an FRC mentor at RPI 2006-2008. The students on your team have always been very impressive. Hope you're enjoying RIT!

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Done, but I think my response is going to skew the results.

[Kevin Leonard]

Over 250 responses! Unbelievable!

Once the data is processed, the processed data will be published on www.beyondinspection.org!

For now, here's an interesting fact about the data. Of the 250+ responses, 180 elected to provide their team number. 79 of those 180 people were on teams that won at least one blue banner in 2014. That's about 44%.

I personally find that very interesting. :)

[techhelpbb]

So this topic has given me a chance to review something my accountant often makes me sit through.

Each year you have an easy 2,000 working hours.
That's 40 hours per week for 50 weeks, assuming 2 weeks of vacation.

For the last few years my total FIRST related activities - not accounting for day dreaming - have hovered close to or over 400 hours.

So that's 1/5 of a work year spent on FIRST over my more than 2,000 hour work year.
I have worked 110+ hour weeks.

I am in the unusual position of being able to actually convert worked time directly into about $100 per hour after taxes (this is actually an average some of what I do pays more and some less) in wages. I have a full time job and I have other sources of income I can tap that merely require time.

Strictly discussing wages I am walking away from around $40k a year.

That does not include the donations which climb into the thousands collectively and the profit that never happened because it required that labor I redirected to FIRST.

For example depending on how you look at the donations I made last year, last year accounting wise I put $62k into FIRST.

The time involved is divided between mentoring, volunteering and 3rd party R&D because the organization does not share my interests but the results are mostly applicable to FIRST.

If anyone has seen me refuse to do something: now you know why.
On the other side: this is how much FIRST and the people involved mean to me.

There is a fine balance here between which is more valuable: my time or my money.
It is difficult to maintain that balance because of cooperation and information issues.

This year was the first time someone flipped this backwards for a little while.
They paid me to mentor and for the travel time to do it.
While all parties involved had involvement in FIRST, it was not a FIRST activity but it was robotics mentoring.

To put that further into perspective I live in NJ.
My property taxes are greatly composed of the cost of my school taxes.
My property taxes on my 1.25 acre exceed $11k a year.
So approaching 1/3 of my income per year (considering some other charity) goes towards education of other people.

As a great deal of this cost is against lost opportunity it can not be written off business taxes as other business donors can.

[Christopher149]

Filled.

[RoboDawg]

Done. Nice job. :]

[TikiTech]

Great idea!

I have an alumni there at RIT!! So I had to help...

:D

Aloha!!

[Tristan Lall]

A few comments on survey methodology:

It's conventional to put the demographic questions at the end, because a lot of respondents are somewhat wary of providing it. If they feel that way, and quit before completing it, at least you have their other substantive responses.1 (If the demographics are a core part of the analysis, this isn't always valid.)
Questions like
How did you get involved with mentoring robotics?
Parent of a student? Sponsor involvement? Experience as a student yourself in robotics competition? Teacher at a school?
lend themselves to multiple choice responses, because that yields categorical data straight from the survey. (Compared to free-form data, categorical data is more powerful for making generalized conclusions, because there are relatively unambiguous ways to compare it with other data.) By instead providing a text box, you end up having to parse the data and code it for key concepts, which is time-consuming. If you want to hear the stories people tell in answering that, consider multiple choice first, plus an optional text box.
Alternatively, sometimes you don't know what categories you need...so in that case, a trial survey can be conducted where you gather a small (statistically insignificant, but likely sufficient to guide your intuition) sample, and generate your full list of categories based on the ideas people provide.
There are some subtle assumptions that you (probably) shouldn't make in crafting the questions. For instance, how should a mentor for an all-year school respond to the questions about summer and the school year? And should a New Zealand team member respond in terms of their summer, or the North American summer that more closely defines a robotics season?
Since you're looking for trends over time, you may want to ask about how a person's responses would have changed over the years. Personally, my involvement is quite different than it used to be, but that's not captured with the present-focused questions.
A simple privacy policy would be nice. (Say how the data will be used and shared. Will the data be available for peer review?)
You may prefer to use a survey service like SurveyMonkey, because it's designed to implement the sorts of refinements that social scientists use when they do research.


Despite those comments, this is a very good survey, and I look forward to hearing what you conclude.

1 Though I'm not sure that's actually the case with Google Forms; it looks like if they quit, you probably get no data. Traditional telephone surveys and most online surveys will still count partial responses.

[Richard Wallace]

Done, but I think my response is going to skew the results.By posting the request here, I think Kevin pretty much guaranteed a few outliers. ;)

[techhelpbb]

Also not accounted for are pre-training hours starting in the fall.
During the summer my time outlay decreases.
However starting in late September the schools are open and within weeks we are back up to 2 nights a week or more plus outside meeting work.

Hence my survey results will not add up to the real total hours expended mentoring yearly.

[Chris is me]

Really appreciate the "Other" text field for gender.

Great survey all around, submitted my answers. Best of luck with the class.

[Kevin Leonard]

A few comments on survey methodology:

It's conventional to put the demographic questions at the end, because a lot of respondents are somewhat wary of providing it. If they feel that way, and quit before completing it, at least you have their other substantive responses.1 (If the demographics are a core part of the analysis, this isn't always valid.)
Questions like

lend themselves to multiple choice responses, because that yields categorical data straight from the survey. (Compared to free-form data, categorical data is more powerful for making generalized conclusions, because there are relatively unambiguous ways to compare it with other data.) By instead providing a text box, you end up having to parse the data and code it for key concepts, which is time-consuming. If you want to hear the stories people tell in answering that, consider multiple choice first, plus an optional text box.
Alternatively, sometimes you don't know what categories you need...so in that case, a trial survey can be conducted where you gather a small (statistically insignificant, but likely sufficient to guide your intuition) sample, and generate your full list of categories based on the ideas people provide.
There are some subtle assumptions that you (probably) shouldn't make in crafting the questions. For instance, how should a mentor for an all-year school respond to the questions about summer and the school year? And should a New Zealand team member respond in terms of their summer, or the North American summer that more closely defines a robotics season?
Since you're looking for trends over time, you may want to ask about how a person's responses would have changed over the years. Personally, my involvement is quite different than it used to be, but that's not captured with the present-focused questions.
A simple privacy policy would be nice. (Say how the data will be used and shared. Will the data be available for peer review?)
You may prefer to use a survey service like SurveyMonkey, because it's designed to implement the sorts of refinements that social scientists use when they do research.


Despite those comments, this is a very good survey, and I look forward to hearing what you conclude.

1 Though I'm not sure that's actually the case with Google Forms; it looks like if they quit, you probably get no data. Traditional telephone surveys and most online surveys will still count partial responses.

I appreciate the pointers. I'm not experienced with surveys and collecting data, but I tried my best to make the questions worthwhile and apply to everyone.

I know I hate it when I take a survey and there's a multiple choice question which has no option that pertains to me- or two answers that both half-apply to me. That's why on the "how did you get involved" question I decided to leave it freeform, but add a few suggestions in the description.

I wasn't thinking of publishing the data when I initially developed the survey. My "privacy policy" was the concluding message telling you I would be using your data for my RIT research project. If I knew I was going to be publishing the information beforehand, I would have added a more extensive opt-in/out or something for the data publishing.

Oh well.
327 responses in. Thank you all for your time!

[rlowe61]

Nice survey. Good questions. Lots of space to give a complete answer. Your paper should be great with all the data you're gathering.

[Carol]

Good job. My only comment is that the survey seems to assume that the team is a school based team. Most are, but there are many teams that are not affiliated with a school. Many mentors have become involved with a team because it is aligned with their company or organization.

[kmusa]

Enjoy RIT. My daughter graduated this year, and her experience there was amazing. And yes, she is a FIRST alum.

[Kevin Leonard]

People from 254 different teams have responded to the survey!
Also, someone who is apparently a "greek god" "the best", and "mentors all the teams" responded.
While it was amusing, i do have to root responses like that out of the survey.

Additionally, if you were the one who claimed you were Travus Cubington who was a Chezy Pof 5eva and had were a Nasuh EJineer, I'm also going to have to throw your response out. (Unless you really are Travis from 254)

Additionally these goofy responses will likely NOT be published along with the rest on beyondinspection.org with the rest of it. So there's really no point. :P

[scca229]

Submitted. My wife is an RIT grad. Have fun with the paper.