Context and purposeHigher Education is facing ever-growing pressures concerning effectiveness, accountability and responsiveness to continuously changing national and institutional environments. Institutions are also faced with challenges related to budget allocation, staffing and improving quality delivery within constrained infrastructural environments. These challenges are supplemented by external factors such political unrest, which impact on the student experience. In these complex times, Institutional Research (IR) plays an integral role in the ways in which the university responds to these challenging times and makes decisions. Knight and Leimer (2010:110) consider IR as an important function that is essential to the accreditation process. It helps with decisions about programme offerings, and the support for teaching and learning. It can contribute to the institution's sound governance arrangements and raise its accountability standards. It can provide the information for conducting programme reviews and thus improve the quality of decisions made on the basis of evidence, leading, amongst other advantages, to sound initiatives for quality improvement. All these functions illustrate the close links between IR and quality assurance leading to quality assurance (QA) functions becoming integral to IR functions only in recent years.Lange, Saavedra and Romano (2013:28-29) state that the implementation of various quality assurance activities heightened the need for adequate data to be captured by management information systems (MIS) and reported and interpreted by the IR practitioners at higher education institutions. Much of the data used in institutional and programme reviews are produced through a variety of IR functions. The challenged environment presents continuous risks to the students' experience at the institution and performance in the classroom. Accurate and informed decision making becomes increasingly important if the institution is to enable student performance and provide quality delivery.In South Africa, the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) introduced institutional audits in 2004. These audits constituted one of the mechanisms through which the national authority carried out its mandate for quality assurance. The audits focused on institutional capacity for quality management of its academic activities in relation to its vision, mission and goals. This served as an important impetus for the establishment of QA units at institutional level in many universities. Maturing processes necessitated collaboration between IR and QA to provide data on institutional effectiveness and efficiency. This collaboration and/or integration of QA and IR was further promoted by the need for IR data for external or national