Figure 22 – Manner in which respondents were sought to complete the questionnaire
3.2.2 Analysis of survey outcomes 41 organisations completed online questionnaires were received by the closing date for the online survey (13th July 2016). This represented an eleven per cent response rate (from the 367 emails distributed). This is above average for a ‘cold calling’ online survey 33. Obviously a sample size of only 40 self-selecting respondents should be treated with caution and extrapolations or conjecture about proportions of businesses with different characteristics must be avoided. A sample size of 2,000 is required to provide a confidence level of plus or minus two per cent. This review will therefore simply focus on the characteristics of respondents and the different responses from those that had differing concerns about cross border data flow requirements. 90 per cent of respondents to this questionnaire described themselves as either an ‘expert’ or stated that they ‘knew a lot’ about their organisation’s use of cloud computing. Responses were received from 15 countries including 13 EU Member States. Respondents came from a range of organisation sizes with the largest organisation employing around 400,000 employees compared to the3 smallest with just one employee. The majority were SME’s (with less than 200 employees), however six respondents had more than 1,000 employees. These six were all from IT or technology related organisations, whereas the rest of the respondents were from varied industrial and sectoral organisations, such as creative industries, research and technology related companies, as well as some government sector representatives.
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Nulty D. 2008. The adequacy of response rates to online and paper surveys. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 33, 3, 301-314.
