BACK TO SECTION 6Section 7: Description of the Respondents and Their Organizations
The final section of the questionnaire solicited additional information which describes the respondents and the organizations for which they work. Detailed results of this section of the survey may be found in Appendix 2 (Respondent Characteristics). In general, the profile of respondents to the 2008 survey is identical to the profile of respondents to the 2007 survey. The only two differences are 1) there are fewer “health care” organizations in 2008 versus 2007 (2.4% versus 12.2%, respectively); and 2) there are fewer firms with less than 25 employees in 2008 versus 2007 (41.0% versus 54.3%, respectively). The first of these may simply be an artifact of changes in methodology (for example, in 2008 we required the respondents to pick a single industry classification, while in 2007 we allowed respondents to pick multiple industry classifications). The second is likely a real change and might reflect our efforts to recruit large firms to the study.
Organizational Characteristics
Respondents represent a wide range of industries but a relatively concentrated geographic area. Key industries represented
include: professional services (20.5%), manufacturing (13.7%), not-for-profits (14.6%), information technology (5.4%),
construction/skilled trades (5.4%), life sciences (4.9%), and logistics (4.4%). No other industry was represented by more than
4% of our respondents.
Slightly over three-fourths (77.1%) of respondents are from organizations headquartered in central Indiana. The remaining respondents are from organizations elsewhere in Indiana, indicating a potential for geography-based bias in the reported results.
About 45% of our respondents are from organizations with revenues of less than $5 million, while about 4% have revenues exceeding $500 million. See Figure 20.
A similar pattern emerges when looking at the number of employees: about one-quarter have fewer than 10 employees and just over 7% have more than 1,000 employees. Figure 21 presents these data.
Respondent Characteristics
Individuals who responded to this question primarily have job titles associated with chief executive status such as CEO,
president or owner (93.2%). Small minorities are in positions titled managing director or partner (5.8%) or chief operating
officer (1.1%). About half (51.2%) have held their position for more than 10 years, while about one-quarter (22.4%) have held
their position for less than 5 years. Three-quarter are male (78.5%).
The group is highly educated. About four in ten (40.5%) have graduate degrees, 14.1% have completed at least some graduate schooling, and 32.7% have completed an undergraduate degree as their highest level of education. See Figure 22 for a complete summary of respondent educational levels.
Respondents report working just over 50 hours per week on average, with 25.4% working more than 60 hours per week. Virtually all respondents (99.5%) also report taking at least some vacation days, with the majority taking between 6 and 15 business days off per year. Sixty-four percent report having a commute time of less than 20 minutes.
Long Term Outlook
We plan to continue repeating this survey annually so that we may identify and track changes over time. While the basic structure and content of the survey remains constant, we plan to make the project even more useful by implementing a few modifications.
First, we plan to continue increasing the sample size by expanding the number and variety of sources containing required contact information. A larger sample will enable us to conduct more robust subgroup analyses.
Second, we will attempt to increase the geographic representation of the sample. This will enable us to assess more accurately the degree to which there are or are not significant and systematic regional differences within the state of Indiana. Third, we will continue to make a few alterations to the questionnaire itself. Some of the new questions will reflect new issues as they arise, and others will provide more usable information by altering response categories to reflect actual variations in the population.
Finally, since so many of the responses were extremely consistent from 2007 to 2008, we believe that many collective opinions are stable or change very slowly. Thus, we will begin to ask some questions every other year. This will shorten the questionnaire substantially and should make the task of responding less onerous.
