Students enrolled on research degree programmes leading to NFQ Level 9 or NFQ Level 10 degrees were invited to take part in the survey. This included both full-time and part-time[22] PGR Students.

The survey was delivered online at the same time as StudentSurvey.ie for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students.

A survey company managed the survey delivery platform. Responses for each individual institution are returned by that survey company to that institution for local analysis at the level of the institution/ faculty/ school/ college/ department, etc.

In line with existing practice for StudentSurvey.ie for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students, specific non-sensitive demographic data are extracted from institutions’ student record systems and sent to the survey company (institutions also submit these data to the HEA Student Record System as part of standard reporting).

This step facilitates the aggregation of data to national-level results, which are presented in this report. It also saves time for the respondent, who would otherwise be required to duplicate the information.

Data protection and respect for the data are at the heart of PGR StudentSurvey.ie.

To this end, individual institutions initially only receive collated percentage responses for those questions with defined response options, and a separate file containing anonymised free text responses to questions seeking additional comments.

Two additional safeguards of confidentiality should be noted here: firstly, on an institutional level, tables of results are populated only where the number of respondents is 10 or greater; however, for chapter 3 of this report, tables of results are only populated where the number of respondents is 100 or greater.

Secondly, qualitative data (open text comments) has been cleaned to remove any names or identifiers of individuals and are provided to institutions without any associated demographic data.

If an individual institution wishes to carry out additional analysis of their institution’s data, they may receive the cleaned pseudonymised data only where they agree to a more detailed data protection protocol.

Results of reliability and validity testing of the 2018 question set have been published on www.studentsurvey.ie and largely the same question set was used in 2023.

[22] Part-time encompasses all respondents who are not full-time, and includes groups of students who may otherwise be labelled as part-time, remote, engaged in e-learning, or some other description of their enrolment.