Bringing Research to the General Public Results of the 2003

Indiana Magazine of History's Readers' Survey

Keith A. Erekson

One year ago, subscribers to the Indiana Magazine of History received a questionnaire regarding the journal. Its main purpose was to gauge readers' opinions about the magazine's content. Responses poured in; by the time I joined the editorial staff in June more than one thousand of them had piled up in the IMH office.1 What follows is a reflective analysis of the content of those responses. It draws both on numeric data—which reveal significant trends and aggregates—and on hundreds of written comments from individual readers, which highlight their unique interests and suggestions, their views about history publishing, and their thoughts about Indiana and its history. This report was not produced by a committee or a computer. Instead, it represents a personal perspective that I hope can serve as the next installment of an ongoing "conversation" between the readers and editors of the IMH. I also hope it will tell you something about yourself as a reader, as a Hoosier, and as a part of a community devoted to carrying Indiana's history into the twenty-first century.	1
Readers Respond to the Survey
The survey accompanying the March 2003 issue consisted of nine questions and an added space for written comments (see Figure 1). The questions solicited readers' opinions about the articles, book reviews, topics, and time periods covered by the magazine. The majority of the questions asked readers to circle their opinion on a five-point scale ranging from "agree strongly" to "disagree strongly" with "no opinion" in the center. The surveys were sent to 8,142 subscribers; and, in the ensuing months, 1,219 were returned, a response rate of 15 percent.	2
Figure 1
The responses to the eight numeric questions are compiled in Table 1. Chart 1 summarizes graphically the three questions that received the most uniformly positive response: numbers one, two, and eight. Combining the "strongly agree" and "somewhat agree" responses for these three questions, we see that 82 percent of readers enjoy most of the articles, 74 percent like reading the reviews, and 73 percent would like to learn more about local history activities around the state. Other questions yield more equivocal responses. A slight majority of readers—52 percent—indicated that they usually read the magazine carefully. Just under half—47 percent—agreed that they have decided to read or not read a book based on its review in the magazine. Readers were evenly split on the question of whether they are interested in reading about Indiana's neighboring states.	. . .