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Canadian Public Health Association

Tools to do the survey

Introduction

School administrators are provided with two options for gaining the informed consent of study participants: an active consent process or passive consent.

An active consent requires parental/guardian signature on a school form for their child’s participation. In a passive consent process, the school board and specific school administers the surveys as part of their ongoing safe school initiative. Parents were advised by the principal to only contact the school if they did not want their child to participate.

In order to preserve the confidentiality and address safety concerns of respondents, schools need to abide by the procedures and protocols for survey administration and student follow up. These procedures require various options for students and parents to access school and community resources to address any needs that surface in the surveys. Staff resources are needed to ensure that students understand the key concepts (physical, verbal, social, and electronic bullying and victimization; verbal and physical sexual harassment, homophobic harassment; racial discrimination) and survey questions, and that class behaviour is appropriate during survey completion.

Tools

Excel databases

To accompany the Safe School Surveys, the Canadian Public Health Association has developed data entry files for schools to use to enter their data after the Safe School Surveys have been administered. These files were developed in Microsoft Excel. There are four data entry files: a grade 4-7 Safe School Student Survey file, a grade 8-12 Safe School Student Survey file, a Safe School Parent Survey file, and a Safe School Teacher/Adult School Staff survey file. These files will allow your school to enter your own data and provide you with statistics (frequencies and percentages) for your school without having to perform any analyses or functions, as the files are set up to do this for you. The Student data entry files provide data by grade and gender, as well as overall totals. The Teacher and Parent data entry files provide overall totals.

These instructions are to assist you with the administration of the Safe School Surveys and to ensure the credibility of the results. Please note that the Safe School Surveys are to be completed no more than once a year. Please review and implement the following procedures.

The files are:

Last modified: June 12, 2017