Mentor Involvement Survey

[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...



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]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

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]

Originally Posted by 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
  
  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.