Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists Project: India 2007-08
Survey Methodology
The Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists Project is aimed at conducting a series of surveys in countries with differing cultures, in order to learn who today’s scientists are and to compare their thinking about a range of contemporary social, economic, cultural, moral and ethical issues. It involves questions on generic or universal topics related to science and public policy as well as issues specific to the particular nation (see Questionnaire). India was the first country chosen mainly because of its growing global importance in science and technology and in the education of scientific, medical and technology professionals.
All aspects of this survey were submitted to and approved by the Trinity College Institutional Review Board and no incentives were offered to participants for completing the survey. All responses were anonymous and identified by a unique ID.
Microsoft Front Page was used to create the web pages. All data collected were stored on a secure website, which required individualized, password protected authorization. There were three sections to the online survey: a consent page, a demographics page, and an opinions page. Upon completion of each section, participants clicked on a <Submit> button to advance to the next section.
A unique email address was created for survey invitations and follow up communications called Scientist Survey. Participant email addresses were collated from various open public resources including internet sites and published documents. Unique random 8 digit IDs were created and assigned to each email address. The Mail Merge function of Microsoft Word was used to send invitations to each email address along with a link to the survey, and this link contained the corresponding unique random ID. At no time were emails addresses linked to individual survey responses. By tracking which email accounts completed the survey and which ones did not, we were able to send reminders to only those addresses which had not responded to our invitation to participate. Additionally, there were separate databases for the three pages (consent, demographics, and opinions). Each database contains the unique ID of the participant, which allowed us to link the three sections.
Emails were obtained by performing Google searches for listings of colleges and universities in India. Many institution’s websites did not have listings of faculty or did not include email address. Nonetheless, a total of 9,461 addresses were identified. While Mail Merge allowed us to send emails one at a time, to limit the bandwidth congestion, emails were sent in batches of approximately 500 at a time, with a delay in between batches of about 15 minutes. Emails that came back as invalid were immediately flagged in the database and removed from future correspondence. There were a total of 1,938 invalid email addresses. Communications from individuals asking to not be contacted in the future about our survey were also removed from future correspondence.
For the remaining 7,500 valid e-mail addresses the completion response rate was about 15%.
Once the survey was closed, the data were scrubbed for incompletes and suspicious entries. Specifically, surveys completed in less than two minutes were considered suspect and removed from analysis.
We first contacted the Indian scientists at the end of August 2007. We e-mailed them
an “Invitation to Participate in International Research” signed by Professor Ariela Keysar, ISSSC Associate Director and Dr. N. Innaiah, Chairman of Center for Inquiry India. A week later we e-mailed the scientists a link to the survey. A few reminder messages were sent to those who did not complete the survey. The “last chance” message was sent at the end of December and final note was sent at the beginning of January 2008. Data collection ended in mid-January.
The median average time spent online completing the questionnaire, including answering questions and adding comments, was 21 minutes. The survey instrument invited the respondents “to participate in an international research project designed to explore the beliefs and values of scientific professionals in India.”
In all, 1,100 participants from 130 universities and research institutes completed the Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists, the largest ever national sample of Indian scientists.