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A survey of U.S. government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was flagged as spam at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Computer Security Incident Response Center. UCS's Center for Science and Democracy director has attributed the low response rate at EPA and other agencies to a "culture of fear":
A periodic survey of U.S. federal scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) caused a bit of a kerfuffle at U.S. EPA last month. For the ninth time since 2005, the science advocacy group sent out a survey to more than 63,000 federal scientists across 16 agencies to gather information about what's happening inside the federal government in relation to scientific integrity. Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said his staff reached out to the agencies to let them know the survey was forthcoming: a memo EPA apparently missed.
"The unannounced, unauthorized, and perhaps illegal message found below this message was sent to me today," Brian Melzian, an EPA oceanographer in Rhode Island, wrote in a Feb. 12 email to EPA's Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC) and others obtained by UCS. [...] Melzian continued: "Finally, if the message found below is legitimate and not bogus, these organizations have been grossly negligent and incompetent for distributing this message without first being authorized and approved by EPA." Rosenberg said while UCS did inform EPA the survey was coming, he is not required to do so and it's up to the agencies to choose whether and how they inform employees about it.
[...] While the survey will remain open for another couple of weeks, the response rate so far has been low — a fact Rosenberg attributes to fear of retaliation. "It suggests the climate and culture for scientists is really fearful," he said. "The culture we've seen more broadly in this administration has been either dismissal or hostility toward science." A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.
As of March 2, response rates for EPA hovered around 2 percent, with 296 completed surveys, compared with NOAA's response rate, which was 4.1 percent with 460 completed surveys. Still, in 2015 NOAA's response rate was 19.6 percent with 2,388 completed responses.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:45PM
Somewhat more moderately, you always have to ask whats the cause and effect. There seems to be no effect. What is the real purpose of this survey? If they're just going to make up politically biased fake news headlines anyway regardless of any results, why help provide data, or why complain if the data isn't being provided? I mean, for political reasons we already know what the only acceptable conclusions of the survey will be, and the resulting headlines. This is no different than running a survey of tobacco company executives asking if smoking is a great idea.
For example of other pointless motivations for running a survey, I once worked at a place with low morale. They surveyed us to claim they cared. They didn't, of course, and did absolutely nothing with the survey results and changed nothing, but surveys ARE cheap and at least some morons likely felt more loved by taking a survey.
Another funny about anonymous surveys, I took one as a 24 year old engineer at a utility company, and the results published back to the employees were granular enough to show 100% of 24 year old engineers in a six person department (aka, me) thought we needed more interdepartmental cooperation or WTF it was exactly. I pointed that out in public during the survey discussion results meeting that the survey was not anonymous and we were lied to, and that really pissed off management. That place had 80 IQ diversity hire managers trying to herd cats over 140 IQ engineers, it wasn't a bad place to work so much as ridiculous on a daily basis. We had diversity hire managers who were illiterate in our field, which was funny when they read powerpoints during presentations, people in charge of highly technical things they couldn't even read or pronounce much less actually lead or manage. The only thing keeping that place afloat was government granted monopoly privs, LOL.