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Each year, ICA conducts an assessment of the most recent conference, not only to find out what attendees thought about the organizing, facilities, presentational formats, and other details, but also to gather suggestions for ways in which we, as officers and Division/Special Interest Group (SIG) planners, can make the conference more enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. For the assessment of our 2007 San Francisco conference, we provide the statistics as well as the themes from our open-ended questions at http://www.icahdq.org. Rather than duplicate some tables in this article, I'd just like to highlight some responses and discuss how we are proceeding with these findings.
For our online survey, 730 attendees, or 34%, of our 2,134 conference participants completed our survey during July and August 2007. This response rate is down a bit from the 2006 Dresden report (39%) but is consistent with our 2005 New York response rate of 32%. Prior to that time, conference evaluation response rates ranged from 6% to 41%. Moreover, 31% of respondents indicated that this was their very first ICA conference, continuing a trend begun in Dresden of attracting new members to our conferences.
Before I report item results, I'd like to thank our survey respondents. We greatly appreciated the time attendees took to answer survey questions and respond, not just to the usual two open-ended questions, but to a total of six open-ended responses asking for opinions and suggestions. The data are incredibly rich and helpful for our 2008 Montreal ICA conference planning!
Some highlights of the report include a very favorable response to conference aspects such as location, organization, quality of sessions, social atmosphere and events, convenience of travel to San Francisco, and accessibility of AV equipment in all sessions. As you may recall, this is the first year that ICA provided LCD projectors in every single session room for PowerPoint(TM) and other presentational capabilities. Ironically, these capabilities come at a time when survey respondents said that they would like to have less reading of research reports and more talking about findings and their implications. Indeed, two themes that emerged across open-ended responses were excitement about the high quality of programs and desire to engage more with other researchers in panels and in social settings.
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Did you know that 70% of ICA conference attendees report that they take their conference bags home with them to use or give to someone else? However, the remainder either discard the bag immediately upon receipt or at the end of the conference. For our bag-discarders, we'll have recycle bins posted at prominent locations for the bags and/or their contents!! One former ICA President reported a creative use for his/her bags-to separate out different course and research materials when carrying them back and forth from home to office. |
Most survey respondents attended divisional/SIG panels (74%), theme sessions (57%), division/SIG business meetings (51%) and receptions (50%), and the first night's ICA reception (49%). Although lower in attendance, the new conference features that Sonia Livingstone and her 2007 SF conference planning team put together - grassroots discussion panels, film program, and internet (wireless) cafe - were well received. Respondents indicated that if they didn't attend certain sessions, it was not because they didn't want to participate but because they often found too many interesting panels and other conference and professional activities scheduled for the same time. We take this response as a good sign that we are programming the kinds of sessions and events that our members value! In general, almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents were satisfied with the number of sessions that they wanted to attend but almost a quarter (23%) indicate that we are edging toward "too many" sessions. We are keeping these and other responses in mind as we plan the number of parallel sessions and miniplenaries for the 2008 Montreal conference.
We introduced some new survey items this year. Two of these asked what activities and/or services conference attendees would like to see continued and discontinued. Of those who provided comments, almost half (48%) said that they would like more social events and changes to engage in professional networking and exactly half (50%) said that there were no services or activities that they'd like their division/SIG to discontinue.
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There were over 47 different countries represented at the 2007 ICA conference in San Francisco-a noticeable gain in our efforts to internationalize by membership and conference numbers, committee membership, and procedural changes!-but down slightly from our international representation in Dresden of 53 countries. | We also asked about attendees' personal experiences with our online (All Academic) submission system. Most reported good - although not great - experiences with the system and we are already using the many thoughtful recommendations to make changes. You may have noted already that your unit planners have been requesting volunteers to sign up online to review submissions. We also intend to notify all submitters about the status of their submissions at one time so that there are fewer time lags and less confusion. Other suggestions about abilities to upload and download papers and in what time frame are under consideration.
Finally, there are a number of suggestions ranging from provision of options for some less expensive lodging to ways of making the graphical user interface for AllAcademic more transparent. We appreciate the time respondents took to complete our survey and plan to discuss, if not implement, recommendations. |
