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Abstract: Telling the Story of Student Privacy Through Intentional Research Design
This paper will outline how researchers set about to tell the story of how undergraduate students view privacy, especially in the context of data collected about them as part of campus and library learning analytics initiatives. Researchers from eight institutions worked together to develop quantitative and qualitative research methods to fill gaps in both the literature and library narratives around learning analytics which favored institutions and often left out the voice of students. The results of this multi-year study showed the students held a nuanced view of privacy but also lacked understanding of the potential harms and uses of their data, especially library data. This new analysis will look at the results of a survey of over 2000 undergraduates to find response clusters that can be used to describe commonalities in experience around privacy in university contexts. Using demographics provided by survey respondents, we then evaluate potential intersectionalities within response patterns. Finally, we examine open text comments of student response clusters to explore other differences in experience.