DOI: 10.18712/nsd-nsd2137-v3
title: Reputation Survey among International Students in Norway, 2014.

description: This survey is a national survey among international students in Norway done by SIU, on the reputation of studying in Norway. The survey aims to get knowledge about the reputation and image Norway has as a country for studying, in addition to map out the motivation for international students to choose Norway and Norwegian education insititutions. Regular surveys will contribute to find changes in students expectations to and experiences of studying in Norway. This is the fourth time that SIU carries out a reputation survey among international students in Norway. First time 2008. In the reputation survey in 2014 the USA was inadvertently not included in the response options for questions Q3 (Home country) and Q19 (Which country was your first choice?). Shortly after the first mailing of the survey that was solved for Q3 by adding the United States to the list of alternative answers in the survey and a new link sent to respondents from the United States. Respondents from the USA were later imported into the main dataset. Three respondents from the United States who answered on the first mailing are recoded from Canada (33) to the United States (196) because of comments in the open questions (Q20 and Q44). It is still possible that more respondents from the United States answered another home country on Q3 in the first mailing without indicating this in the open questions. For Q19 such correction was not undertaken because this would involve sending out the survey again to all respondents. For this question, it was not possible for respondents to enter USA as their first choice. A total of 864 respondents answered this question by stating another country as their first, 2352 respondents have not responded and are recorded as "missing". In the subsequent open question Q20 "Please explain Briefly why this country was your first choice," has a total of 697 respondents provided a response in the form of free text. 28 respondents state in their answers directly that the US was their first choice, but this option was not on the list. It is likely that the number of respondents who had USA as their first preference is far higher than this. Of these, a total of 273 respondents selected UK, representing 27.5 percent of valid respondents to this question. Because of this error in the response options for Q19 it's not possible to say how many of the respondents in the survey had the US as their first choice. It is also associated weaknesses with th UK figure, which is probably greater than it would be with the US on the list. In the SIU report series 07/2014 this problem is solved in that it only looked at the number of respondents who have English-speaking countries first. In the printed version of the report the weakness of the data set is not mentioned. In the online version/web version the weakness is described in a footnote related to the discussion of priority destination country on page 26. If users of this dataset still want to use Q19 in their analysis, it is important to account for the shortcomings and weaknesses that are accounted for here. Data are freely available for downloading.