Pharmacy School Survey Standards Revisited

Abstract

In a series of 3 papers on survey practices published from 2008 to 2009, the editors of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education presented guidelines for reporting survey research, and these criteria are reflected in the Author Instructions provided on the Journal's Web site. This paper discusses the relevance of these criteria for publication of survey research regarding pharmacy colleges and schools. In addition, observations are offered about surveying of small "universes" like that comprised of US colleges and schools of pharmacy. The reason for revisiting this issue is the authors' concern that, despite the best of intentions, overly constraining publication standards might discourage research on US colleges and schools of pharmacy at a time when the interest in the growth of colleges and schools, curricular content, clinical education, competence at graduation, and other areas is historically high. In the best traditions of academia, the authors share these observations with the community of pharmacy educators in the hope that the publication standards for survey research about US pharmacy schools will encourage investigators to collect and disseminate valuable information.

Insights, Pearls, and Guidance on Successfully Producing and Publishing Educational Research

“…In the past, the Journal published guidelines regarding survey research, [1][2][3][4] guidelines for conducting scholarship of teaching and learning, 5 and general stylistic considerations/instructions for authors. 6 These standards are provided to authors so that readers can have reasonable confidence that published works are of sufficient quality with appropriate internal validity (ie, how well the study was conducted and how confidently we can conclude that the change in the outcome variable was produced solely by the independent variable and not extraneous ones) and external validity (ie, the extent to which a study's results can be generalized to other settings).…”

The Scholarly Merit of Social Media Use Among Clinical Faculty

“…However, as no such validated survey tool exists currently, this is an area for further development. Second, the limited response rate of this survey study (22%) does not meet the ideal response rate minimum of 80%, which adds complexity to the interpretation and analysis of these results, 25 as it may not represent the views and attitudes of the entire academic community. However, it does provide important observations derived from the low response rate.…”

Help! Dean Drowning in Survey Requests

“…Rather than administer a survey that may result in a response rate of 15% or less, consider an alternate method using qualitative methods such as interviews or focus groups. The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education has published a series of papers on survey research standards, and have embedded those standards in the instruction to authors [6][7][8][9][10] While there has been discussion questioning the Journal's expectation for response rate, 11 regardless, investigators naturally want the highest response rate possible to strengthen the generalizability of their findings. A low response rate may result in non-responder bias.…”