As promised, here is the data from the survey. Fell free to post any questions or comments.
Once again, thank you to everyone who participated (33% response rate is so much better than I could’ve ever hoped)!
Also, I am planning to have my dissertation defended this summer. Then, the whole document with all the data and analysis will be available on the University of Florida Library’s web site. I will probably post a link to it as well – so, ask for it in August or check back here. However, it will be a long 200-plus academic document. If NIRI or other professional organizations are interested, I will be happy to write a shorter practitioner-oriented summary. I will, then, also post a link here.
What are those two types of IROs? Was it just based on their titles? Then, what titles did you call managers and what technicians?
No, not really. It was done using cluster analysis (here is the article about Cluster Analysis on wikipedia). Basically, the analysis is based on the way respondents practice investor relation, their titles were not even used for this. It turned out that there were two types of investor relations practices. After that, looking on the results I decided to call them managers and technicians because this is where the biggest difference between the two groups was.
Finally I looked at the titles. I compared the titles of practitioners in each group – this confirmed the factor analysis – the people in group I called managers in fact had more senior titles than people in group I called technicians.