Occasionally the author of such a reply was also 

 writing on his own behalf because the inquiry letter 

 had also been sent to him. In this case, the letter was 

 counted twice, as the response of both officials. 



The inquiry letter asked each respondent to 

 propose the two most critical issues or problems 

 facing research along with any solutions he cared to 

 suggest. When the letters were analyzed, the 

 difference between a problem and a solution often 

 proved to be very slight. A problem such as lack of 

 money in some area implies its own solution directly, 

 while some proposed problems, such as the lack of 

 long-range planning, are solutions more than 

 problems. 



The classification of responses was difficult for 

 many reasons. A set of categories had to be developed 

 that was not so fine-grained as to fail to classify, by 

 leaving a great number of distinct categories. Yet it 



could not be so coarse as to lose entirely the many 

 differences of nuance among the letters. Again, the 

 degree of coarseness ideally should be the same for all 

 categories. It was also found that the issues as 

 specified by our set of categories were closely 

 interconnected in the minds of the respondents. Thus 

 what they called an "issue" or"problem" might in fact 

 bring up several categories, especially if it was in a 

 long statement. Because of these difficulties, which 

 are to be expected in a content analysis, it did not 

 seem appropriate to present the survey results in the 

 form of frequency tables. In place of this, rank-order 

 tables were developed, as shown in Appendix E, 

 which are not as quantitatively detailed. This kind of 

 semiquantitative tabulation is suitable to the non- 

 statistical character of this inquiry, the purpose of 

 which is not to report quantitatively on the relative 

 importance of issues, but simply to identify the most 

 important ones. Appendix D contains a complete list 

 of the categories or issues from each sector. 



Table A-1.— Mailing Dates 



Universities 



Presidents 



Vice-Presidents 



First Letter 



Second Letter 



Department Chairmen 



Industry 



NSF Industrial Panel 



Presidents of Corporations 



Government 



Directors of FFRDC's 



Directors of Intramural Laboratories 

 Agency Officials 



Independent Research Institutes 



Presidents or Directors 



First two weeks 

 of June 1975 



May 21, 1975 

 July 1, 1975 

 On or after 

 July 1, 1975 



May 23, 1975 

 May 23, 1975 



July 11, 1975 

 June 2. 1975 

 May 30. 1975 



May 23, 1975 



96 



APPENDIX A 



