basic inventory of published research. The approach was to
develop a simple two-question survey (Appendix D) using the
same research categories used to group the papers from the
research scan. The approach was to ask respondents to list the
three topics they felt were most in need of additional research
and the three topics they felt were already overly researched.
From the results of the survey, the categories and subcategories
were separately ranked.
The survey was distributed to academics and industry
professionals as outlined in the initial description. This
resulted in 743 responses of which 120 were partial answers
where respondents selected items they felt required more
research but did not feel anything was “over researched.” We
found that although the instructions indicated to select the 3
more important items most respondents selected far more. Of
the 84 options the 743 respondents selected 5,547 categories or
an average of 7.47 items they felt needed more research. The
623 respondents who chose an option about “overly
researched” selected 2,679 or an average of 4.3 topics (see
Appendix F for results).
As a result of the much stronger expression of topics
requiring additional research, the overall weighting results in a
much longer list of topics where more research is desired. We
feel this is reflective of the actual belief and intent of the
respondents.
We felt that the design of the opinion survey would
provide a number of interesting perspectives on the various
topics presented: