Hi sorry if I’m not seeing it in the nice series of posts on the survey, but how was the survey distributed? I’d be curious to any context to get a sense of any potential selection bias in the survey. It seems like there’s around 2200 respondents. Does someone have a sense of ballpark how many that is relative to the total number of EA participants and potential respondents?
Also is there a reason why there wasn’t a survey in 2021?
Thanks for your comment! (Just to clarify, this is a post about our separate EA Groups survey, but I assume you’re asking about the EA Survey).
The EA Survey is distributed through a variety of different channels or ‘referrers’ (including e-mails and social media from the main EA orgs, the EA Forum, e-mailing past survey takers, and local groups). The vast majority of responses come from a relatively small number of those referrers though (80,000 Hours, EA Forum, Local Groups, e-mail to past respondents and the EA newsletter being the main ones). You can see more detail on the composition here.
We discuss representativeness issues in more detail here (the major issue, of course, is that no-one knows the true underlying composition of the EA community, so it’s hard to assess the representativeness of the sample against the true population), and provide some sensitivity checks based on the different referrers here.
Our post on what we estimate the size of the EA community as a whole is here. We can estimate the size of the population of people who are highly engaged with EA reasonably well through comparing various benchmarks for which we do have data, and we estimate that in 2019 we sampled around 40% of that population (a little less in 2020). We estimate that we sampled much lower shares of people who are less engaged with EA, though it’s also much more difficult to estimate the true size of these populations (e.g. it’s much harder to know how many people in total have read a few articles about EA or listened to a few podcasts). We do have some more analyses forthcoming about estimating these different stages in the funnel following on from our work on how many people have heard of EA here (which is even harder to estimate).
There wasn’t a survey run in 2021 because the 2020 survey was run very late in the year (right at the end in fact). On average, there’s historically been around 15 months between EA Surveys, rather than 12 months, which means we also skipped 2016, and it’s also better not to run the EA Survey during the very end of the year (due to holidays and so on), so we thought it better to run it during the middle of the year this year.
Hi sorry if I’m not seeing it in the nice series of posts on the survey, but how was the survey distributed? I’d be curious to any context to get a sense of any potential selection bias in the survey. It seems like there’s around 2200 respondents. Does someone have a sense of ballpark how many that is relative to the total number of EA participants and potential respondents?
Also is there a reason why there wasn’t a survey in 2021?
Thanks for your comment! (Just to clarify, this is a post about our separate EA Groups survey, but I assume you’re asking about the EA Survey).
The EA Survey is distributed through a variety of different channels or ‘referrers’ (including e-mails and social media from the main EA orgs, the EA Forum, e-mailing past survey takers, and local groups). The vast majority of responses come from a relatively small number of those referrers though (80,000 Hours, EA Forum, Local Groups, e-mail to past respondents and the EA newsletter being the main ones). You can see more detail on the composition here.
We discuss representativeness issues in more detail here (the major issue, of course, is that no-one knows the true underlying composition of the EA community, so it’s hard to assess the representativeness of the sample against the true population), and provide some sensitivity checks based on the different referrers here.
Our post on what we estimate the size of the EA community as a whole is here. We can estimate the size of the population of people who are highly engaged with EA reasonably well through comparing various benchmarks for which we do have data, and we estimate that in 2019 we sampled around 40% of that population (a little less in 2020). We estimate that we sampled much lower shares of people who are less engaged with EA, though it’s also much more difficult to estimate the true size of these populations (e.g. it’s much harder to know how many people in total have read a few articles about EA or listened to a few podcasts). We do have some more analyses forthcoming about estimating these different stages in the funnel following on from our work on how many people have heard of EA here (which is even harder to estimate).
There wasn’t a survey run in 2021 because the 2020 survey was run very late in the year (right at the end in fact). On average, there’s historically been around 15 months between EA Surveys, rather than 12 months, which means we also skipped 2016, and it’s also better not to run the EA Survey during the very end of the year (due to holidays and so on), so we thought it better to run it during the middle of the year this year.