I like the approach of surveying interest among academics—it’s something I’ve considered in other areas, so appreciate seeing this report. And it’s great to see the responses were overall quite favourable.
Did you consider asking academics if they would have been interested in collaborating on the research projects? I wonder whether this survey missed some direct “field-building” opportunities.
I also wonder if there have been many other surveys sent to academics via “cold call” emails, and what sort of response rate they have tended to have. The 2.8% response seems really low to me—intuitively this feels like evidence of disinterest in the topic, but I’m not sure how unusual this is.
We did consider asking academics about that, but we finally decided against it as that could have distorted the results of the survey, and our primary goal here was to get the information we were looking for.
We have a similar opinion about the response rate. We were expecting it to be quite low, though not that much (we had initially planned to send 2,000-2,500 emails, and ended up sending almost 4,000). Other surveys among scientists do get much higher response rates, although they can vary a lot.
Yeah, that definitely seems a reasonable concern. I guess you could still follow up the survey with an additional question for those who gave more favourable responses? Would depend on how you collected the survey though, e.g. if it was anonymous.
<<Other surveys among scientists do get much higher response rates, although they can vary a lot.>>
If you know of specific, comparable examples and are able to share their names/citations I’d be keen to take a look at them. This seems like a fairly difficult-to-Google topic, although I found one survey that received responses from 190 of the 231 academic departments that it mailed surveys to.
I might refer to your survey (and the point I’m making here, about high interest from respondents but a low response rate) in a research report I’m writing at the moment.
Yes, the survey was anonymous. At any rate, at this point we know of scholars who could carry out work on fields related to helping wild animals (right now we’re funding welfare biology research in Canada, New Zealand, and Spain). The main constraint to getting work done is funding.
If you know of specific, comparable examples and are able to share their names/citations…
These are some examples, though it’s anecdotal evidence. It’s also hard to say to what extent they are relevantly comparable:
I like the approach of surveying interest among academics—it’s something I’ve considered in other areas, so appreciate seeing this report. And it’s great to see the responses were overall quite favourable.
Did you consider asking academics if they would have been interested in collaborating on the research projects? I wonder whether this survey missed some direct “field-building” opportunities.
I also wonder if there have been many other surveys sent to academics via “cold call” emails, and what sort of response rate they have tended to have. The 2.8% response seems really low to me—intuitively this feels like evidence of disinterest in the topic, but I’m not sure how unusual this is.
Hi Jamie, thank you!
We did consider asking academics about that, but we finally decided against it as that could have distorted the results of the survey, and our primary goal here was to get the information we were looking for.
We have a similar opinion about the response rate. We were expecting it to be quite low, though not that much (we had initially planned to send 2,000-2,500 emails, and ended up sending almost 4,000). Other surveys among scientists do get much higher response rates, although they can vary a lot.
Yeah, that definitely seems a reasonable concern. I guess you could still follow up the survey with an additional question for those who gave more favourable responses? Would depend on how you collected the survey though, e.g. if it was anonymous.
<<Other surveys among scientists do get much higher response rates, although they can vary a lot.>>
If you know of specific, comparable examples and are able to share their names/citations I’d be keen to take a look at them. This seems like a fairly difficult-to-Google topic, although I found one survey that received responses from 190 of the 231 academic departments that it mailed surveys to.
I might refer to your survey (and the point I’m making here, about high interest from respondents but a low response rate) in a research report I’m writing at the moment.
Yes, the survey was anonymous. At any rate, at this point we know of scholars who could carry out work on fields related to helping wild animals (right now we’re funding welfare biology research in Canada, New Zealand, and Spain). The main constraint to getting work done is funding.
These are some examples, though it’s anecdotal evidence. It’s also hard to say to what extent they are relevantly comparable:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0023677213498717
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1936-6434-6-33
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224262
https://search.proquest.com/openview/ed1e06c98c82a3bfd790861cb43f63fe/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818062