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Section 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 (Organizational and Respondent Characteristics). In general, the profile of respondents to the 2009 survey is identical to the profile of respondents to the 2008 survey. The four relatively minor differences are: 1) there are more “health care” organizations in 2009 versus 2008 (7.8 percent versus 2.4 percent, respectively); 2) there are more respondents with tenures less than 5 years (31.4 percent versus 22.4 percent); 3) there are fewer respondents aged 41 to 50 (21.5 percent versus 30.2 percent); and 4) there are relatively fewer female respondents (14.2 percent versus 21.5 percent). Given the large number of classification questions and the relatively small magnitudes of these differences, we are satisfied that the samples surveyed in 2009 and 2008 are functionally equivalent.
Organizational Characteristics
Respondents represent a wide range of industries but a relatively concentrated geographic area. Key industries represented include professional services (15.4 percent), manufacturing (12.8 percent), nonprofit (10.8 percent), construction/skilled trades (6.4 percent), information technology (5.5 percent), logistics (5.2 percent), and life sciences (4.7 percent). No other industry was represented by more than 4 percent of our respondents.
Nearly four out of five (79.5 percent) 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 42 percent of our respondents are from organizations with revenues of less than $5 million, while about 4.4 percent have revenues exceeding $500 million (see Figure 14).
A slightly different pattern emerges when looking at number of employees: about one quarter have fewer than 10 employees and about 11 percent have more than 1,000 employees. Figure 15 presents these data.
Respondent Characteristics
Individuals who responded to this questionnaire primarily have job titles associated with chief executive status such as CEO, president, or owner (94.0 percent). Small minorities are in positions titled managing director or partner (4.8 percent), or chief operating officer (1.3 percent). About half (49.2 percent) have held their position for more than 10 years, while just under one third (31.4 percent) have held their position for less than 5 years. Eighty-six percent are male.
The group is highly educated. Over four out of ten (44.5 percent) have graduate degrees, another 14.2 percent have completed at least some graduate schooling, and 28.5 percent have completed an undergraduate degree as their highest level of education. See Figure 16 for a complete summary of respondent educational levels.
Plans for the CEO Survey
We plan to continue repeating this survey annually so that we may identify and track changes over time. While the core structure and content of the survey remains constant, we plan to make the project even more useful by implementing a few modifications each year. Most of these changes will simply be continuations of the improvements we included in the 2009 survey.
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. Indeed, the sample size has grown each year so far, increasing 7 percent from 2007 to 2008, and then jumping 60 percent from 2008 (n = 225) to 2009 (n = 360).
Second, we will continue to 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. So far, we have not been especially successful in these efforts as the sample remains heavily weighted toward central Indiana.
Third, we will continue to make a few alterations to the questionnaire itself. New questions will reflect new issues as they arise. For example, in 2008 we added questions on tax increases (a topical issue that year), and in 2009 we added questions related to the economic downturn.
Finally, since so many of the responses have been extremely consistent over time, we believe that many collective opinions are stable or change very slowly. Thus, we will continue to ask some questions every other year. This will shorten the questionnaire substantially and should make the task of responding less onerous. We believe the higher sample size obtained in 2009 is at least partially due to the decreased length of the CEO survey.
