Thanks for the response, I really like hearing about other people’s reasoning re: study design! I agree that randomly excluding highly qualified people would be too costly, and I think your idea of building a control group from accepted-cancelled EAGx attendees across multiple conferences is a great idea. I guess my only issue with it is that these people are likely still experiencing the FOMO (they wanted to go but couldn’t). If we are considering a counterfactual scenario where the resources currently used to organise EAGx conferences are spent on something else, there’s no conference to miss out on, so it removes a layer of experience related to ‘damn, I wish I could have gone to that’.
I’m not familiar enough with survey design to comment on the risk of adding more questions reducing the response rate. If you think it would be a big issue, that’s good enough for me—and also I imagine it would further skew the survey respondents towards more-engaged rather than less-engaged people. I do think that for the purpose of this survey, it would make more sense to prompt the EAGx attendees to answer whether they had followed up on any connections / ideas / opportunities from EAGx in the last 6 months. I’m not sure how to word that so that the same survey/questions could be used for both groups though.
Thanks for the response, I really like hearing about other people’s reasoning re: study design! I agree that randomly excluding highly qualified people would be too costly, and I think your idea of building a control group from accepted-cancelled EAGx attendees across multiple conferences is a great idea. I guess my only issue with it is that these people are likely still experiencing the FOMO (they wanted to go but couldn’t). If we are considering a counterfactual scenario where the resources currently used to organise EAGx conferences are spent on something else, there’s no conference to miss out on, so it removes a layer of experience related to ‘damn, I wish I could have gone to that’.
I’m not familiar enough with survey design to comment on the risk of adding more questions reducing the response rate. If you think it would be a big issue, that’s good enough for me—and also I imagine it would further skew the survey respondents towards more-engaged rather than less-engaged people. I do think that for the purpose of this survey, it would make more sense to prompt the EAGx attendees to answer whether they had followed up on any connections / ideas / opportunities from EAGx in the last 6 months. I’m not sure how to word that so that the same survey/questions could be used for both groups though.