COPA membership survey reveals
interesting tidbits
By Adam Hunt
The 2002 COPA membership survey has been tabulated and analyzed and, as
promised to all who participated, the results are being published in two parts.
This month and in November.
There are many items of interest here. COPA members have told us about
themselves, about aviation in Canada and about COPA. So, to not over-run with
limitless amounts of numbers I will just give the results as a percentage,
rounded off to whole numbers, where applicable.
Regarding survey participation, usually most associations consider themselves
lucky to get a five per cent response rate to mail-in surveys of this type.
COPA members out did themselves on this survey, with 18 per cent of members
answering the survey on paper or the COPA Web site.
Many COPA members added comments to their survey forms indicating that they were
pleased to be surveyed.
Because the participation rate for this survey is so high the results are more
representative of all COPA members than if the survey had a smaller
participation rate.
One section of the survey was specifically designed to find out how
representative the survey is of COPA members in general. By comparing where the
survey respondents said they lived, to where we know all COPA members live from
the membership list, we could tell how representative the survey was of the
general membership.
The results were encouraging. Almost all of the provinces and territories were
represented in the same proportions they are in the general COPA membership list
- within about one per cent or less.
This tends to show the survey has a high degree of “external validity.” In other
words what we found in the survey will be generally applicable to COPA members
as a whole.
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