Survey on professionals working at the interface of science

Dear colleague,

We would like to invite you to take 10-15 minutes of your time to participate in the study entitled “PIoS – the missing link”. This study aims at better understanding the different profiles of professionals at the Interface of Science (PIoS) working at science funding/policy/observation agencies and their participation in professional organizations. 

Your responses will be kept confidential. All the data will be anonymised.

Participation in this study is entirely voluntary. However, we believe that your participation will be valuable to our research and findings that could lead to a better recognition of your profession. We expect that your contribution to this study will provide greater awareness of the profession, from a worldwide perspective. We hope to contribute to the recognition of the specificities of these professionals and provide recommendations on professional frameworks, training, development, and associations.

The survey will be available until June 30, 2020.

Link to the survey: http://tiny.cc/san1oz (feel free to forward it to other colleagues who might wish to complete the survey). You can check for additional information at the website of the project available at: http://tiny.cc/ukl1oz

The survey has been developed by Carolina Varela (NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Portugal), José Santos (Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal) and Simon Kerridge (University of Kent, UK). 

Any questions or concerns should be directed to the lead researchers: 

Carolina Varela of the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities- cvarela@fcsh.unl.pt

José Santos of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança – josesantos@ipb.pt

Simon Kerridge of the University of Kent – s.r.kerridge@kent.ac.uk

Many thanks in advance for your participation.

Additional information

About the questions

The inquiry will address your academic and professional background and profile, the main characteristics of your job position, your views on your contribution to research and innovation ecosystems, and on PIoS as a professional community.

 The survey is aimed at PIoS, no matter who they work for, or in which country. With each question a brief explanation is provided so as to clarify any doubts arising from different geographical working contexts. 

 You may leave the survey at any time you wish, leave questions unanswered. If you do not wish to participate, you may simply exit the survey.

Data use and confidentiality

Appropriate measures have been adopted in order to assure the anonymous nature of the survey. Thus, the responses will be encrypted and no IP location data will be collected. Data will be stored at institutional secure servers. 

The raw data will be anonymised  for analysis and results will be published accordingly. If you want to withdraw your submitted data, you can do so up until the time that the questionnaire closes, by contacting the project team.  After that it will not be possible as we will have started the anonymization process.

 You may wish to view the Qualtrics survey tool privacy policy and security statement to better understand how your data will be protected. 

 In addition, we will treat any personal information that we have on you with the strictest confidentiality and in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), effective as of 25 May 2018. Further details are provided in the University of Kent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Privacy notice for research – University-level document.

Risks

All responses are anonymous and we have minimized the risk of  breach of confidentiality by enabling SSL encryption and removing collection of IP addresses using the industry standard Qualtrics survey tool. We believe eventual risks are minimal.  While the questions are not of a sensitive nature, and all are optional, it is possible that some might bring back memories of previous experiences, however we view the likelihood of these causing distress as being low.

Ethical approval

This survey has been developed by an international team of PIoS from Portugal and UK. It has received ethical approval  from the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal (ref 8/2020 on 20th December 2019), from the University of Kent, UK (ref: 0421920 on 17th April 2020), and from the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Portugal (ref: FCSH-EA-1/2020 of 15th May 2020).