B.C. School Arrangements Survey

Thanks for your interest in the B.C. School Arrangements Survey. The 2013 round of the survey is now closed.

The purpose of this survey is to help us learn how different Kindergarten schedules affect children and families, both during the Kindergarten year, and in the subsequent Grade 1 year. In particular, we are interested in learning about how Kindergarten schedules affect children’s behaviour, social development and health, and parents’ work arrangements, health, and family income. The results of this study will help us to better understand the challenges that families of young children face, and what works best to support young learners.

Participation in this survey is optional. You have the right to refuse to participate or to withdraw your consent to participate at any time. You have the right to end the survey at any point prior to completion. You may choose to leave some questions unanswered. You also have the right to at any point to retroactively withdraw your consent and request that your response be deleted from the data. Please be aware that our ability to delete your response is limited by whether we can determine which response is yours, which in turn is limited by the identifying information you can provide about your response (e.g., date and time that survey was completed).

There are no risks to you or your family from participating. Your answers will be used only in university research to help us understand how school arrangements affect children and families, on average. We do not report results for individuals, schools or communities. Individual-level survey response data are only available to our research team, and our survey contractor, and will never be provided to any other party including any branch of the BC, Canadian or U.S. governments. Our published reports will contain only aggregated findings. Although we have taken extensive precautions to safeguard the data and to maintain confidentiality, data that is transmitted using the internet can never be assumed to be 100 percent private. Data will be held by A. Willock Information Systems, Inc. until the survey is closed on approximately July 25, 2013; and will then be transferred to the researchers. All surveys will be stored in a locked filing cabinet and on an offline, password protected computer in secure premises at SFU, and destroyed five years after completion of the study.

This research project has received funding from Simon Fraser University and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. When complete, the results of this research will be available from Dr. Jane Friesen at Simon Fraser University. If you have any questions or comments about the survey, or if you wish to retroactively withdraw from the survey, you can contact us by email at friesen@sfu.ca (778-782-3403). If you have any complaints you can contact Simon Fraser University’s Office of Research Ethics: dore@sfu.ca (778-782-6593).