Dear Colleagues:

Since announcing the invitiation to participate in the Research
Administrators Salary Survey we have received (at this moment) 51
responses.  This is approximately 1/6th of the minimum desired number.

Some have emailed me with reservations about the anonymity and
confidentiality of their responses.

You should understand that anything you send over the internet can be
traced back to the internet account from which you send it.   Any
persistent third party can intercept your mail if they know enough about
the system.  And, of course, it means that I, as second party to the
email, can associate your responses with your names, if I choose to.

Well, folks, I do not intend to.  But, if you are still worried about
it, you may FAX your response to me at 562/985/8665, leaving off all
personal identification information from the cover page, but (PLEASE)
indicating that you are a degree-granting institution.  You can trust to
my frugality that I will not be wasting my time checking out your FAX
phone number.  Also,  FAXed responses require that I (no staff for this
project) enter the information from paper to screen, so this is
DEFINITELY not my preferred way of doing this.

For those who send in the normal way, you should know that I am looking
for the .edu suffix on the emails to assure that the respondants are
actually from degree-granting institutions.  The actual salary
information is way down at the bottom of the form, so I do not associate
that confidential information with your name when I am doing this check.

Some have emailed me to say that the Send function of the form does not
work or that they get various error messages.  I am sorry about that,
but there is nothing much I can do about the various kinds of firewalls,
virus detectors, and whatnot at your campus and mine that intervene to
mess with this process.  As I noted in the invitation, AOL accounts
almost always have problems with HTML forms.

Nevertheless, to provide one more level of access to the survey, I have
replicated the site on another server at the University, and the URL for
this mirror site is: http://www.csulb.edu/~research/6/survey.htm.  It is
a UNIX-based Apache server; the main URL:
http://www.ur.csulb.edu/6/survey.htm is on an NT server (for those of
you who understand the differences and implications.)  If one does not
work for you, please try the other.

I hope that we can get a good statistically reliable survey accomplished
this month before the economic recession muddies the waters of salary
administration too much.  So, I am urging you to take advantage of this
opportunity to participate.

Those of you with significant experience in multi-variate analysis might
want to consider how you would deal with the data being generated.  I
would be most obliged for additional consulation on this.  We
soon-to-retire Russian Historians are not generally known for extensive
skills in that area.

Thanks,

Jim

--
James R. Brett, Ph.D., Director,
Office of University Research
California State University, Long Beach
562-985-5314  562-985-8665 fax
http://www.csulb.edu/~research/

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