Dyad Seeking Pilot Campuses for Potential New Member Survey
THE RESEARCH TEAM AT DYAD STRATEGIES IS LOOKING FOR CAMPUSES TO PILOT OUR POTENTIAL NEW MEMBER SURVEY BEGINNING IN JANUARY 2019.
This survey will feature our newest measure, the Motivation to Join Scale, as well as a number of other measures designed to measure student beliefs and attitudes around topics such as hyper-masculinity, openness to diversity, moral development, conformity and authenticity, as well as their prior experiences with hazing and alcohol and other drugs.
The Potential New Member Survey’s feature measure, the Motivation to Join Scale, gauges student beliefs about what they expect to gain from membership in a fraternity or sorority, and the priority that they place on each of four different motivations: social status and experiences, belonging, leadership/engagement opportunities, and networking opportunities. This measure, in combination with other measures of student beliefs and experiences, will give campuses a realistic view of the nature of students seeking to join campus fraternities and sororities, the attributes (both positive and negative) they bring with them prior to joining, and a clear understanding of what they are looking to gain from fraternity/sorority membership.
The development and launch of the PNM Survey will be the first in a three-tiered initiative by Dyad Strategies to help both our campus and headquarters clients better understand the nature of their fraternity/sorority members and, more importantly, to understand the impact that membership in fraternity/sorority chapters has on their development. The second tier of this research project will involve a New Initiate Survey, available to both campus and headquarters clients, which will seek to understand how new members are socially integrated into their chapters. The final tier of this research will be longitudinal in nature - understanding how the beliefs and experiences that prospective members bring to their fraternity/sorority chapters, in combination with the manner in which they are socially integrated into those chapters, predicts the culture of those chapters over time through the use of our existing measures for campus and headquarters clients.
“We see our new initiatives related to studying potential members and new initiates as a win-win proposition,” said Dr. Gentry McCreary, the CEO and Managing Partner of Dyad Strategies. “Campuses and headquarters will be able to receive valuable information about the students joining their organizations and the ways that new members are socially integrated into their organizations. More importantly, as researchers, we will be able to answer some important questions about the impact of fraternity and sorority membership. In particular, we hope to be able to answer the age-old ‘chicken or the egg’ question –how do pre-college attributes and student motivations to join impact chapter culture, what impact do students have on the culture of the chapters they join, and what impact does the culture of the chapters they join have on them? These are basic, fundamental questions about to the fraternal experience to which need answers, and this initiative is aimed at answering them.”
CAMPUSES THAT ARE INTERESTED IN PILOTING THE SURVEY IN JANUARY 2019 MUST BE ABLE TO COMMIT TO THE FOLLOWING:
Access (via electronic survey) to at least 200 students (100 male, 100 female) registered for a formal or informal recruitment process
Access (via electronic survey) to a comparison (control) group of at least 200 (100 male, 100 female) non-affiliated students not participating in the recruitment process
Providing Dyad Strategies with a list of the chapters that students join at the completion of the recruitment process
Providing an incentive for students to complete the survey (gift card, entered into drawing for a book scholarship, etc.)
A small administrative fee to cover survey and data analysis/reporting expenses
Participating campuses will receive an executive summary of the data collected, with data aggregated at the community and chapter levels, and benchmarked against other pilot institutions.
Campuses that are interested in participating in the pilot should reach out to Gentry McCreary via email at gentry@dyadstrategies.com. Opportunities to participate in this pilot are limited and only 5-7 campuses will be selected.