FINAL QUESTIONS

I think for question one the wording is a little vague "Contacts" - What contacts? and like in the government or just in general? and the quality of them or? "Control over investment" Control of any investment? Investment is a pretty broad word and a statement like control over investment could mean just about anything. "Expertise, skilled leadership" I don't know if this is really a good one, are we asking if interest groups most important factor is have expertise? or skilled leadership. I think maybe organization might be a better word here. "Ability to spread information" this again sounds a little bit non-descript maybe things like public influence, or simply the size of the organization.

I agree....'ability to spread information' one would think would be dependent on all the other options given

I agree with Thomas about question one, though I think we really ought to (at least partially) reiterate the question itself. I am relatively new to this thread, however the question ""What resource do you think is most necessary for interest groups in order to influence environmental policies?" seems somewhat long. To make it more concise, I propose we perhaps ask "Which of the following do you feel most help interest groups influence environmental policies" instead.

Returning to Thomas' point of the vagueness of some of the potential answers however, I feel that "contacts" and "ability to spread information" are two that I would like to see changed. 'Contacts' could imply a lot of things - are we talking about contacts in the government (if so, federal or provincial?), from private businesses, or extra-political organizations? I think we need to narrow contacts down to perhaps 'political contacts in government' since we are dealing with policy making, but this is my personal opinion. As for 'ability to spread information', we could change it to 'media-distributive capacity' or simply 'marketing'.

Just my two cents! :)

I think the vagueness actually contributes to the generality we want to have in our questions, I dont think its so vague that we should change it. I think we should keep what samantha had originally.

I changed tar sands to oil sands. I just feel it may influence people's responses if we frame the energy project as a 'dirty' one.

I also changed trade association to industry trade group. Just seems a lot more colloquial. Also, I added the oil tanker moratorium question to the final question.

Also i cleaned up the first question to bring it in line with all the comments people have posted. I opted to allow the respondents to rank the resources according to relative importance. Hope thats fine with everything.