Agenda - Planning Commission - 12/04/2014

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The National Citizen SurveyTM Appendix C: Detailed Survey Methods The National Citizen Survey (The NCSTM) was developed to provide communities an accurate, affordable and easy way to assess and interpret resident opinion about important local topics. Standardization of common questions and survey methods provide the rigor to assure valid results, and each community has enough flexibility to construct a customized version of The NCS. Results offer insight into residents' perspectives about the community as a whole, including local amenities, services, public trust, resident participation and other aspects of the community in order to support budgeting, land use and strategic planning and communication with residents. Resident demographic characteristics permit comparison to the Census as well as comparison of results for different subgroups of residents. Survey Validity The question of survey validity has two parts: i) how can a community be confident that the results from those who completed the questionnaire are representative of the results that would have been obtained had the survey been administered to the entire population? and 2) how closely do the perspectives recorded on the survey reflect what residents really believe or do? To answer the first question, the best survey research practices were used for the resources spent to ensure that the results from the survey respondents reflect the opinions of residents in the entire community. These practices include: • Using a mail-out/mail-back methodology, which typically gets a higher response rate than phone for the same dollars spent. A higher response rate lessens the worry that those who did not respond are different than those who did respond. • Selecting households at random within the community to receive the survey to ensure that the households selected to receive the survey are representative of the larger community. • Over -sampling multi -family housing units to improve response from hard -to -reach, lower income or younger apartment dwellers. • Selecting the respondent within the household using an unbiased sampling procedure; in this case, the "birthday method." The cover letter included an instruction requesting that the respondent in the household be the adult (18 years old or older) who most recently had a birthday, irrespective of year of birth. • Contacting potential respondents three times to encourage response from people who may have different opinions or habits than those who would respond with only a single prompt. • Inviting response in a compelling manner (using appropriate letterhead/logos and a signature of a visible leader) to appeal to recipients' sense of civic responsibility. • Providing a pre -addressed, postage -paid return envelope. • Offering the survey in Spanish or other language when requested by a given community. • Weighting the results to reflect the demographics of the population. The answer to the second question about how closely the perspectives recorded on the survey reflect what residents really believe or do is more complex. Resident responses to surveys are influenced by a variety of factors. For questions about service quality, residents' expectations for service quality play a role as well as the "objective" quality of the service provided, the way the resident perceives the entire community (that is, the context in which the service is provided), the scale on which the resident is asked to record his or her opinion and, of course, the opinion, itself, that a resident holds about the service. Similarly a resident's report of certain behaviors is colored by what he or she believes is the socially desirable response (e.g., reporting tolerant behaviors toward "oppressed groups," likelihood of voting for a tax increase for services to poor people, use of alternative modes of travel to work besides the single occupancy vehicle), his or her memory of the actual behavior (if it is not a question speculating about future actions, like a vote), his or her confidence that he or she can be honest without suffering any negative consequences (thus the need for anonymity) as well as the actual behavior itself. How closely survey results come to recording the way a person really feels or behaves often is measured by the coincidence of reported behavior with observed current behavior (e.g., driving habits), reported intentions to behave with observed future behavior (e.g., voting choices) or reported opinions about current community quality with objective characteristics of the community (e.g., feelings of safety correlated with rates of crime). There is a 28