The data contain questions measuring: student perceptions of professional boundaries, experiences of misconduct by HE staff on students, gender and occupation of perpetrators, the effect of experiencing conduct, responses to misconduct, reporting behaviours and demographic questions.This project explores the professional boundaries between staff and students within higher education. An online survey of NUS extra card holders yielded a final sample of 1,492 students. Exploratory factor analysis identified two factors: Comfort with personalised interaction and comfort with sexualised interactions. Demographic analysis indicates that generally females and home students were substantially less comfortable with personal or sexualised interactions compared to male and international students. Black and Asian student also report feeling less comfortable with personalised interactions than white students however, this difference is not found within sexualised interactions. Generally the majority of students report feeling neutral or uncomfortable with the majority of personalised interactions with staff and report feeling uncomfortable or very uncomfortable with sexualised interactions. These results call into question existing policy frameworks with HE and provide an evidence base for institutions and policy makers to consider professional boundary frameworks more in line with students expectations.

An online survey was emailed to all members who held an NUS extra card and had provided a viable email address to the NUS. A link to the survey was also posted on twitter. 1839 valid survey responses were received of which 1528 came from current students and 311 from former students. After removing former students and those who did not wish to share their data or have it analysed in research the final sample of the data was 1492.