I was a little surprised not to see the 2019 EA Survey mentioned here since we included around 8 questions about these issues that were written and requested by CEA.
As in your interviews, the 2019 EA Survey also asked people why people that the respondent knew left EA
We also asked whether people’s level of interest in EA had (increased or) decreased and what lead to that change
We asked what factors were important for people’s retention
And we also asked about what barriers people faced to greater involvement in EA
All of these questions can be analysed looking only at the 926 people who were levels 4-5 on the self-reported EA engagement scale. (They could also be analysed looking only at people who reported actually doing specific things like taking the GWWC pledge or changing career plan largely motivated by EA principles.)
I think a sizable advantage of the interviews is that the responses were to open rather than fixed questions (only the ‘reasons why people’s level of interest changed’ question was open comment). Since the categories included in these questions were not very comprehensive, clear or consistent, the results are probably somewhat arbitrarily skewed towards particular categories, while ignoring others, and may not be easy to interpret. On the other hand, the survey results have the advantage of drawing from a much larger sample of people. More than sheer sample size, the fact that the survey respondents are probably a broader/more representative sample of EAs seems important. It’s not clear how representative the views of people who are thought to know about retention are, or whether there are individuals who know much about what is important for retention in EA.
As it stands, I’m not sure which source of information I prefer, but I think I’d strongly prefer the results from an EA Survey with better questions (for example, we could base survey options around the categories you identified in your interviews or our own qualitative data).
Reasons why people left EA
These are the reasons mentioned as to why people (known to the respondents) who were levels 4-5 engagement left EA (based on n=178 responses):
Barriers to higher involvement
Barriers to higher involvement are not (necessarily) the same as reasons to stop being involved, but comparing responses to this question to your table, we can see some overlap. (The results below are for level 4-5 EAs only).
Among the open comment responses, personal issues and being too busy, which may correspond to your last two categories were also commonly mentioned, though unfortunately they weren’t offered as fixed category responses (in which case they probably would have received more responses).
One thing that stands out is that lack of EA friends was a much less commonly cited issue for engaged EAs than among less engaged EAs (see below):
This open comment data is for the whole sample, not only EAs who were level 4-5 on the engagement scale (since it was qualitative data which we analysed separately it would take a while to narrow it down to only highly engaged EAs). Still, it highlights that overall personal issues and people being too busy were commonly mentioned in the broader sample (despite not being included among the fixed options) and these plausibly correspond somewhat to the ‘life event’ and ‘burnout/mental health’ categories you mention.
Factors important for retention
These are the factors selected as being important for retention by level 4-5 EAs. Unfortunately the categories are very different to the other questions and the categories that came up in the interview so it’s hard to compare.
Reasons for reduced interest
Below are the reasons (based on people’s qualitative comments) for their having less interest in EA than they did 12 months ago. Only ~18% of respondents reported that their level of interest had decreased, so these number are pretty low.
Labels for these categories are included in Appendix 1 of our post and pasted below.
Thanks David – an earlier draft of this post had a table cross-referencing which factors had been listed in which previous work, including EA Survey data, but it got too confusing since every post used its own categorization scheme. I decided to just publish my synthesis without trying to clean that up since I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and I appreciate you doing some of that cross-referencing in this comment!
Overall, it seemed like different sources more or less agreed about the most common retention risks, which is encouraging and seems consistent with your analysis in this comment.
And I do see that I linked to the 2018 EA survey but not the 2019 one; I’ve added that as a link now, thanks!
I was a little surprised not to see the 2019 EA Survey mentioned here since we included around 8 questions about these issues that were written and requested by CEA.
As in your interviews, the 2019 EA Survey also asked people why people that the respondent knew left EA
We also asked whether people’s level of interest in EA had (increased or) decreased and what lead to that change
We asked what factors were important for people’s retention
And we also asked about what barriers people faced to greater involvement in EA
All of these questions can be analysed looking only at the 926 people who were levels 4-5 on the self-reported EA engagement scale. (They could also be analysed looking only at people who reported actually doing specific things like taking the GWWC pledge or changing career plan largely motivated by EA principles.)
I think a sizable advantage of the interviews is that the responses were to open rather than fixed questions (only the ‘reasons why people’s level of interest changed’ question was open comment). Since the categories included in these questions were not very comprehensive, clear or consistent, the results are probably somewhat arbitrarily skewed towards particular categories, while ignoring others, and may not be easy to interpret. On the other hand, the survey results have the advantage of drawing from a much larger sample of people. More than sheer sample size, the fact that the survey respondents are probably a broader/more representative sample of EAs seems important. It’s not clear how representative the views of people who are thought to know about retention are, or whether there are individuals who know much about what is important for retention in EA.
As it stands, I’m not sure which source of information I prefer, but I think I’d strongly prefer the results from an EA Survey with better questions (for example, we could base survey options around the categories you identified in your interviews or our own qualitative data).
Reasons why people left EA
These are the reasons mentioned as to why people (known to the respondents) who were levels 4-5 engagement left EA (based on n=178 responses):
Barriers to higher involvement
Barriers to higher involvement are not (necessarily) the same as reasons to stop being involved, but comparing responses to this question to your table, we can see some overlap. (The results below are for level 4-5 EAs only).
Among the open comment responses, personal issues and being too busy, which may correspond to your last two categories were also commonly mentioned, though unfortunately they weren’t offered as fixed category responses (in which case they probably would have received more responses).
One thing that stands out is that lack of EA friends was a much less commonly cited issue for engaged EAs than among less engaged EAs (see below):
This open comment data is for the whole sample, not only EAs who were level 4-5 on the engagement scale (since it was qualitative data which we analysed separately it would take a while to narrow it down to only highly engaged EAs). Still, it highlights that overall personal issues and people being too busy were commonly mentioned in the broader sample (despite not being included among the fixed options) and these plausibly correspond somewhat to the ‘life event’ and ‘burnout/mental health’ categories you mention.
Factors important for retention
These are the factors selected as being important for retention by level 4-5 EAs. Unfortunately the categories are very different to the other questions and the categories that came up in the interview so it’s hard to compare.
Reasons for reduced interest
Below are the reasons (based on people’s qualitative comments) for their having less interest in EA than they did 12 months ago. Only ~18% of respondents reported that their level of interest had decreased, so these number are pretty low.
Labels for these categories are included in Appendix 1 of our post and pasted below.
Thanks David – an earlier draft of this post had a table cross-referencing which factors had been listed in which previous work, including EA Survey data, but it got too confusing since every post used its own categorization scheme. I decided to just publish my synthesis without trying to clean that up since I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and I appreciate you doing some of that cross-referencing in this comment!
Overall, it seemed like different sources more or less agreed about the most common retention risks, which is encouraging and seems consistent with your analysis in this comment.
And I do see that I linked to the 2018 EA survey but not the 2019 one; I’ve added that as a link now, thanks!