The NSF grant reporting database in “Fastlane” maintains separate tables for five employee categories:
- Principal investigators
- Co-principal investigators
- Senior personnel
- Postdocs
- Graduate students
For the FAS, the PDP focused on the “postdoc” category for fiscal year 2006. A random selection of 250 individuals was selected from academic institutions. Sixty-four additional cases came from non-academic institutions, for a total of 314 individuals.
Locating contact information
Contact information was not available for individuals in the sample. PDP conducted internet searches to find the most current contact information (email address, telephone number, and street address).
|
Academic institution |
first step |
Institution’s online directory |
| second step |
Google search engine |
|
Non-academic institution |
first step |
Institutional directory (if publicly available) |
| second step |
Google search engine |
An e-mail or postal mail address was found for 207 individuals. They were invited to participate in the survey.
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