Methods

Email Survey

In order to determine the attitudes of the nursery industry about invasive plants, I obtained the contact information of the American Nursery and Landscape Association. The ANLA member addresses were provided to me by Craig Regelbrugge, the Policy Director at ANLA. Of the approximately 8000 members, 457 members with email and were located within the continental US. I chose 31 email addresses to send my pilot survey, leaving 427 members to survey.

From my results gathered from 11 pilot responses, I made revisions to my survey and sent out the finished version to the remaining 427 email addresses on January 18, 2000. Important changes that were included in my revised survey were the option to print out and mail the survey (rather than just reply and email back the survey) - about half of all respondents chose to mail me their responses. The other change was that I chose to separate my participants into regional categories in order to ask them whether they sold plants that were invasive within their region of the country. (See the survey.)

The questions in my survey addressed the nursery's setting and size; their definition of "invasive plants", their opinion of five plants in their region (did they sell them, did they think that they were invasive); how they thought the problem should be regulated, if at all; their willingness to participate in various programs; whether they were a member of ANLA (the survey may have been forwarded to nonmembers) and their opinion of ANLA; and their interests in more information on the issue. It was loosely inspired by a survey designed by Norris Muth (1997) for his study of Rhode Island nurseries' purple loosestrife sales habits (See my survey.)

Fifty-four nurseries responded to this first survey (see survey distribution page for details). In order to gather more responses I sent out a second copy of the survey to those ANLA members with email who had not responded to my first email. Another 23 responded to that survey, totaling 77 responses to my survey, 76 of which had email addresses in the ANLA database. This represents a 22% response rate, and 1% of all ANLA members.

In order to compile the information from the survey, I created a form within Microsoft Access. The responses were then exported to Microsoft Excel in order to tabulate the quantitative questions and detect correlations.