• Arrange for youth survey participants to have access to computers.
   
  • Make available as many computers as you can during the survey period to meet the target of at least 30 completed surveys per grade level.
  • Create enough space between computers so that youth do not discuss their answers with one another and cannot see one another’s answers. One easy way to accomplish this is to seat participants of different age groups next to each other so they are not using the same survey.
  • Have a survey administrator provide basic instructions and be available to answer any questions. This person should emphasize that youth should not discuss their answers with each other.
• Decide how you will organize youth to take the survey. This will vary depending on how many computers are available and other Club activities that are scheduled during the survey period. You may use a combination of strategies, such as:
  • Setting aside time within each of the Club’s most popular, well-attended programs for participating members to complete the surveys. If your Club requires members to participate in Power Hour or homework time, for example, ask youth to complete surveys during one of these hours.
  • Organizing the process by Club “spaces.” You can ask youth who are in a particular room (e.g., games room or gym) to go to the computer lab on a rotating basis.
  • Encouraging individual youth who were not in a particular activity or space at the time that group was called to go to the computer lab to complete the survey.
  • Scheduling a separate time for youth with serious reading difficulties or whose first language is not English to take the surveys. A volunteer or staff member can read the questions aloud or translate them for such a group.
  • Keeping track of the number of youth who take the surveys each day. At the end of each day, tally the number of young people at each grade level who have completed surveys.
  • Seeking out young people in grade levels where participation has been lower the following day.
  • Extending your survey period and actively seek out youth at the grade levels needed if you have not surveyed at least 30 youth in each grade group by the end of your original survey period (and more than 30 are enrolled in the Club).
  • Being aware that your overall survey data will be more reliable as you increase the number of youth respondents. Having at least 30 youth in each grade group complete the surveys is a bare minimum.

How to Log Youth On

Once your Club requests and receives a password and Club ID from BGCA, you will be able to access the surveys and all other interactive features of the Tool Kit site from your Club’s computers. You will go to the Taking Surveys section of the site, where you will log your Club in using your password and Club ID.

Once that is done, the site will automatically take you to the log-on page of the youth survey area. At this point, you can seat your youth respondents at the computers and get them started taking the surveys.

Using Identifiers

The first time Club youth log onto the survey area, they will create their own original identifier by answering a series of simple questions that appear on the log-on page. Identifiers are special codes that will not be known to anyone else in the Club. This code allows individual youth to return on a second day to complete a survey, if necessary. They don’t need to memorize or write down this identifier. New and returning survey takers use the same log-on page containing the series of identifier questions as their starting point.

What Club Staff Need to Know about Identifiers

• Identifiers are “blind” codes that no one at the Club will be able to link to a specific young person’s survey. Identifiers help ensure that youth’s answers are kept confidential while at the same time providing the Club with access to the cumulative survey data.
• Identifiers give youth a way to log back onto the surveys if they aren’t able to complete the surveys in one session. For optimum results, however, Club staff should encourage youth to complete the surveys in one sitting.
• Identifiers allow Clubs to track whether the same youth take the survey from one survey period to the next.
• Identifiers make it possible to analyze groups of students’ survey responses over time without knowing which answers came from particular youth. For example, using the identifiers of a group of survey respondents, data from one survey period could be pulled and compared with that from a subsequent survey period to see if there have been changes in youth’s perceptions, behaviors or attitudes.

What Club Youth Need to Know about Identifiers

• Emphasize to each group of survey respondents that their answers will be completely confidential.
• Tell youth that Club staff cannot know any individual youth’s identifier. Club staff cannot see individual members’ survey results.
• Assure youth that the Club can use identifiers only to collect information from the completed surveys of large groups of young people and compare information gathered in different survey periods.

Administering Surveys Offline

While BGCA strongly recommends that Clubs use the online Tool Kit surveys for optimum efficiency, the surveys for the three grade groups are available as PDF files that can be downloaded and/or printed out for manual survey administration.

If a Club must administer surveys on paper because of a lack of computers or Web access, it is recommended that a staff person be designated to input all the completed surveys into the online Tool Kit. By doing this, the Club will still be able to take full advantage of the Tool Kit’s automated scoring, tabulation and reporting features.

Club staff should ensure that the confidentiality and anonymity of young people’s survey responses are protected just as they would be in an online survey administration process.

You can download or print out paper versions of the surveys here. If you don’t have Acrobat Reader on your computer, you can download it for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

Elementary School Survey
Middle School Survey
High School Survey