2020 National Survey of Scientists and Engineers on COVID-19

This is a random probability sample survey of academic scientists conducted online in this U.S. from May 7-28, 2020 to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the science community. The final sample consisted of 362 completed questionnaires and a final AAPOR response rate of 20.9%. The survey was conducted by the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University. The survey instrument examined questions regarding how COVID-19 and related policies impact academic research, funding issues related to COVID-19 science communication, and regulation of COVID-19 research. The survey also collected data on individual background and perceptions of impacts, behavior and expectations due to COVID-19. The population for the survey included non-tenure track, tenured, and tenure-track academic scientists who hold the doctoral degree from three subfields (biology, civil and environmental engineering, and biochemistry) at 20 randomly selected universities classified as Carnegie designated research extensive (R1) universities in the United States. The sample was designed with the following protocol. We identified all R1 Carnegie classified research intensive institutions (131 total) using the most recent Carnegie listings. We then stratified the institutions by eight Carnegie region classifications. Because the eight regions vary in size, a proportionate distribution from each region was randomly selected, ensuring that selected universities within each region represented multiple states. For each selected university, we developed a list of all tenure and tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty in biology, civil engineering, environmental engineering, biochemistry and genomics. The final sample was randomly selected from these faculty lists. The completed sample was weighted by gender and academic field to represent the population as closely as possible. A conservative measure of sampling error for questions answered by the full sample is plus or minus 5 percentage points. The survey was approved by Institutional Review Boards at Arizona State University and at the University of Illinois at Chicago.