Page 84 - Fall2020

The Acoustics Today Reader Survey Kat Setzer
This spring, Acoustics Today (AT) Editor Arthur Popper and Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Publications conducted a survey of AT readers to help us improve the quality and value of AT to the Society and our mem- bers. Primarily, we wanted to ensure that AT continues to provide outstanding articles that help educate readers on a wide range of acoustics topics. A second goal was to enable AT to serve as a source of information useful to ASA members, both about the Society and about topics of particular value.
We received 758 responses, including dozens of helpful comments (some of which I’ll share in this article). This article outlines some of the main results from the survey.
Figure 1. Pie chart depicting answers to the question, “How long have you been a member (including student or associate member) of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA)?”
84 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020 | Volume 16, issue 3
Who Took the Survey?
Of the 758 people who responded to the survey, 99.3% (753) were ASA members, which makes sense given that the magazine is included with ASA membership! Figure 1 shows the breakdown of respondents based on their time as members in the ASA.
The survey also asked for the readers’ primary technical committee (TC). These results allowed comparison of our data with data from surveys done of ASA member- ship and The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) authors and readers in 2018. Table 1 shows that the distribution of AT respondents’ primary TC closely parallels ASA membership TC distribution.
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Figure 2. Bar graphs comparing professional affiliation for ASA members (N = 1,117), authors and readers of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA; N = 1,453), and readers of Acoustics Today (AT; N = 726). Both JASA and AT surveys included student options; because the ASA survey did not include this option, however, these answers have been left out and percentages recalculated.
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.3.84