6. ELIGIBILITY OF RESPONDENTS

We classified each respondent as eligible or ineligible based on whether it met the definition of a museum, as measured by its responses to the following parts of Question 24: We classified respondents that gave the required answer to each question as eligible. We classified respondents that gave a contrary answer to at least one of the questions as ineligible. We classified respondents that gave no contrary answers, but gave a blank or unusable answer to any of the questions, as having undetermined eligibility. The exception is that if a respondent did not answer the question "Is it a private for-profit organization?", but answered "yes" to either "Is it a part of a government agency or entity?" or "Is it a private not-for-profit organization?", then we considered it as having given the required answer to "Is it a private for-profit organization?"

We could not exclude respondents that are part of the U.S. Government, because the questionnaire did not ask that question. IMS excluded institutions that it found to be part of the U.S. Government when it constructed the sampling frame, drew the sample, and conducted telephone follow-up of non-respondents. Based on these efforts, we will assume that no respondents are part of the U.S. Government, although this assumption constitutes an obvious weakness in the survey's findings.

We initially classified 36 respondents as being of undetermined eligibility. IMS reviewed each of these responses and supplied revised responses to parts of Question 24 where possible based on its own records, the American Association of Museums' Official Museum Directory, or telephone calls to the respondent. These revised responses allowed us to reclassify 27 respondents as eligible, and 3 as ineligible, leaving only 6 respondents with eligibility undetermined.

Table summarizes the disposition of the sample. 

               Table :  DISPOSITION OF SAMPLE, BY STRATA

                                            Apparent Other
                                            minority

Sample                                            45  483
Discarded as ineligible                            0    4
Questionnaire mailed to                           45  479
Responses from addressees                         27  376
Non-respondents determined ineligible              4   32
Non-respondents not determined ineligible         14   71
Respondents determined eligible                   20  313
Respondents determined ineligible                  7   57
Respondents whose eligibility
not determined                                     0    6

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