Conducting Membership Surveys in an Era of Technological and Demographic Change

• Activity Number: 277
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section*
• Author(s): Mary Jordan*+ and Elena Gerstmann*+ and Roman Czujko*+ and Jessica Kohout*+
• Affiliation(s): American Chemical Society and IEEE and American Institute of Physics and America Psychological Association
• Keywords: Membership Surveys ; Response Burden ; Segmenting Surveys ; Response Rates ; Aging Populations ; Internet Surveys

Abstract

The Survey Review Committee (SRC) is pleased to announce a revised charter and new procedures for 2002. To share this news with the ASA, the SRC brought together a panel of experts from professional societies to share their insights into conducting membership surveys. Elena Gerstmann is the Director of IEEE Research, which conducts many different membership surveys. The IEEE is the largest professional technical association in the world with over 365,000 members. Jessica Kohout is the director of APA's Research Office, which handles a minimum annual load of 1000 information requests--20-30 survey efforts--for the 130,000 members of APA. Mary Jordan, workforce analyst for ACS, conducts the ACS national economic surveys, analyzes the data, and publishes up to 30 reports annually for the 165,000 chemical professionals of ACS. AIP's Director of the Statistical Research Center, Roman Czujko, and his staff of 14 work on about 20 surveys yearly for AIP's ten Member Societies. The panelists will provide an overview of their organization's surveys and then focus on special topics of interest to the panelist, such as aging populations, response burden, segmenting surveys, and internet suveys.