QUESTION: What salary surveys are used by ERI? Is there a way to find out which surveys are providing the data for a specific position in a specific geographic location? Are there lists of employers surveyed or estimates of the non-redundant number of individual incumbents surveyed from the most current surveys?
For ERI's compensation and benefits survey reports for the United States and Canada, numerous industry-specific and job function surveys are published annually with data from for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Participating organizations include national, regional, and local companies that vary in size from very small to extremely large in terms of revenue. Survey submissions are accepted online and via email. As described in the survey methodology, ERI assures that all data collected is sufficiently aggregated such that individual organization compensation cannot be identified by the user. Survey participants may choose to participate anonymously. The identities of participating organizations and the names of organizations in the public domain are presented in the Source and Participating Listing at the end of the report unless the organization requests in writing to have its name withheld. Lists may be truncated due to formatting constraints. See www.erieri.com/surveys.
For the Assessor Series, ERI collects available salary survey data for jobs and areas; evaluates each survey for validity, reliability and use; and compiles mean and median salaries for positions with similar duties, responsibilities, skills and functions. ERI does not, however, provide our subscribers with an exact list of those surveys used in any one Assessor Series because the data and surveys utilized changes from quarter to quarter (with rotation of older and newer surveys in and out of the analysis) and because even a list that tied a particular position or area or industry to a list of surveys would not convey the weighting given by our analysts for individual position data, survey reliability, incumbents, industry weighting, etc.
In general, most individual surveys report participants, but do not tie specific data to those participants. All compensation research firms, including ERI, wish to safeguard the privacy of individual survey participants. In general, ERI does not confirm whether a specific employer's data is included in any particular Assessor Series application analysis, that is, unless the employer has publicly released this information. Survey participants are displayed on the Base Salary Graph as dots over the data plots described above. If you put your cursor over a survey participant dot, then the source data will display. Participation may have been via ERI's patented on-line survey, ERI Salary Surveys, ERI field job analyses, ERI's eDOT Skills Project, Occupational Assessor's cybernetic selected characteristics of occupations contribution to the latter, digitized reading of IRS public documents, US SEC proxies, 10-Ks, and 8-Ks, manual digitization of public UK and European countries' companies' annual reports, Canadian SEDAR data (under license), and/or other data licensed for use in the Assessor Series from organizations such Statistics Canada, national statistics offices of other countries, and others. All of these sources comply with US DOJ/FTC Antitrust Safety Zone Statements by meeting the following conditions: 1) provider participation in surveys is managed by a third-party; 2) the information provided by survey participants is data more than three months old; and 3) there are at least five providers reporting data upon which each disseminated statistic is based, no individual provider's data represents more than 25% on a weighted basis of that statistic, and any information disseminated is sufficiently aggregated such that it would not allow recipients to identify the prices charged or compensation paid by any particular provider (unless part of the public record).
We also provide total population statistics that will help subscribers to evaluate whether an adequate population of incumbent employees within the area for which employers are competing for talent has been surveyed. In this regard, ERI is peerless. We know that our combination of multiple survey data means that we are analyzing the largest populations possible, in most cases much more than 30% of the employers in a given area. There are currently over 46 million US and Canadian employees included in ERI's Salary Assessor database. Since we have analyzed so many sources in order to report updated consensus results, we expect our pay data to be more representative of market norms than any one specific published survey, particularly if it relies on a smaller sample (e.g., SEC proxies alone) or is out of date. According to the statistical laws of large numbers, Central Tendency and Bernoulli’s Law, Assessors that aggregate multiple overlapping sources covering virtually entire populations will be more accurate in normative terms than any one survey of a more limited sample.
Employee population statistics may be reviewed by clicking the
button in the lower-left corner of the screen in the Salary Assessor or Executive Compensation Assessor application.
The accuracy derived from those samples freshly surveyed in each database is further revealed in the Variance Statistics screen (accessed via the 
button in the lower-left corner of the screen) which discloses the standard error of the largest single component of our multiple survey sources.
Confidential survey data is not included in ERI consensus analyses, unless permission is granted by the publisher. Requests for information on individual surveys are referred directly to individual publishers.
To learn more about how data from multiple salary surveys are combined in the Assessor Series, see Assessor Series FAQ #31.