Measuring a university institutional image among senior high school students

Abstract

We applied a sampling plan oriented to obtain reliable information on the Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, from senior high school students in the university’s area of influence. The university made the decision of characterizing this population through a sampling survey, given the fact that these students represent the main population the university is intended to serve. For the students selection we started by determining the main characteristics of the main and sampling population (which would be made of the high schools in this case), to continue then with the number of high schools to be included in the sample as well as the distribution of the sample among the cities where the sampling will be carried out. Within each sampled city we selected four domains according to whether or not the high schools were public or non-public and academic or non-academic. Once established the high schools to be included in the sample, we visited each one of them and surveyed all the students in one of the last grade classes. We picked the first one in all cases, to avoid any selection sampling bias. This way we have a one step cluster sampling with proportional sharing by city in order to take into account the cities’ size according to the number of high schools, and to the number of registered last grade students. Since we did not have access to information on the number of registered last grade students, we used as a proxy the number of students taking the 2008 version of the SABER 11 examination. We explain the sampling plan, and present the main results.