CEDARS is based on a standard question set to allow us to measure our performance in these areas over time and compare our practices with groups of institutions and the national results:

• Informing our actions in implementing the principles of the revised Researcher Development Concordat, thus, helping us to create the best culture for researchers to thrive.
• Providing evidence that informs policy and best practice in researcher employment, management, and career development.
• Providing those who support researchers with an updated understanding of the institutional environment and development needs of researchers and research leaders.
• Contributing to achieving and maintaining the University’s HR Excellence in Research award.

And UK wide, by… 

• Contributing to the UK research system by informing and evidencing the actions needed to foster a healthy, supportive research culture to ensure our researchers can thrive. 

Additionally, participation in CEDARS can be included in host organisation statements written for all major national and European funding bodies to demonstrate our commitment to ensuring a positive research culture and the career development of researchers.

The national survey is carried out by the Research & Enterprise Directorate and the questionnaire hosted on the JISC Online surveys platform.

On the launch date (24 March 2025), all eligible staff will receive a launch email from the Survey Officer, Jill Morgan, that will contain the link to the survey.

This will be followed up by reminders throughout the survey period. Please note that due to data protection, and measures to ensure confidentiality & anonymity (see details) it is not possible to identify which staff have, or haven't completed the survey, so reminders will not be targeted.

The survey is very simple to answer and will take about 20 minutes of your time, but the information you provide will bring long-lasting benefit to you and your peers. 

All questions are optional except for those required to route you to questions pertinent to your experience and circumstances. For your responses to be recorded you need to go through to the end of the survey and press the submit button.

Your right to anonymity and confidentiality are critically important and therefore your responses will be anonymous: you will not be identified or identifiable in reports or any published results. 

We will protect your anonymity in several ways: 

• You are not asked to provide any personal identifiers (i.e., your name or e-mail address).
• The raw data from this survey is confidential and can only be accessed by the Survey Officer.
• We collate responses so that we only use the data in a way that cannot identify individuals and do not use the individual responses you make to the survey.
• We do not use data collected through the survey to make decisions about individuals or to analyse information on an individual level.
• Any reports generated from these data will be screened to ensure full anonymity. This means that if there are less than five responses for specific protected characteristics, departments, or other groups within the university, these will not be analysed separately. 
• The survey asks that any comments you make should not identify yourself or any specific members of staff. The Survey Officer will screen qualitative comments prior to any dissemination or publication of the results to ensure they reveal neither the identity of respondents nor that of others, even by implication.
• Any free text responses containing identifiable characteristics (regarding the survey participant or others) will be redacted. Consequently, please be aware that surveys are not a mechanism for formal complaints.
• The aggregated institutional response data will be used by Vitae in order that a national data set can be created to analyse UK-wide trends and provide benchmarking for each university’s analysis.
• Neither data provided to Vitae, nor the reporting/analyses of response data internally will enable individuals to be identified.   

Data and results from individual institutions, as well as overall data and results, will be stored on an encrypted database (Jisc Online Surveys). Under Data Protection Act 1998 JISC will meet Data Processor requirements. The University of Wolverhampton will be the Data Controller and data storage is in compliance with The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

No body, other than the University, JISC or Vitae (the research and development function of CRAC), will have access to the University of Wolverhampton’s data or results, or is permitted to identify or publish those data or results, without our prior consent. Data from individual institutions will not be released by CRAC, Vitae, the Steering Group or its agents to any third party.

Any persons making a Freedom of Information request to JISC will be directed to make their requests to individual institutions. Under the Freedom of Information Act, an institution can be asked to share its results, but not the underlying data. CRAC is not gazetted under the Freedom of Information Act and cannot be required to release data or results from individual institutions.

The UK aggregate data for benchmarking will be available after all the surveys are closed and Online Surveys has pulled all the institutional datasets together.

The analysis of the UK aggregate results is usually published in an annual report at the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference:

• CEDARS National Results 2023