Subscales in the National Student Survey (NSS): Some considerations on their structure

Abstract

Student satisfaction measures are important for policy. The National Student Survey (NSS) is a tool which often features in such policy decisions. Its most recent revision has been argued to capture eight dimensions (clusters) of student satisfaction. We used the public data from the NSS from 2019 and clustering methods to examine the structure in: a) the overall dataset and b) 78 course subjects. For the overall data, we found a four cluster, rather than eight cluster, solution. At course level, the most common cluster solution was two clusters, but with considerable variation, ranging from one to eight clusters. Our findings thus suggested that there is considerable variation in the structure of the NSS and that this variation can depend on analytical level (overall data vs. specific course subjects). We review the implications of this for the usage of the NSS as a metric for policy.