Agenda - Planning Commission - 12/04/2014

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The National Citizen SurveyTM body of scientific literature that has investigated the relationship between reported behaviors and actual behaviors. Well-conducted surveys, by and large, do capture true respondent behaviors or intentions to act with great accuracy. Predictions of voting outcomes tend to be quite accurate using survey research, as do reported behaviors that are not about highly sensitive issues (e.g., family abuse or other illegal or morally sanctioned activities). For self -reports about highly sensitive issues, statistical adjustments can be made to correct for the respondents' tendency to report what they think the "correct" response should be. Research on the correlation of resident opinion about service quality and "objective" ratings of service quality vary, with some showing stronger relationships than others. NRC's own research has demonstrated that residents who report the lowest ratings of street repair live in communities with objectively worse street conditions than those who report high ratings of street repair (based on road quality, delay in street repair, number of road repair employees). Similarly, the lowest rated fire services appear to be "objectively" worse than the highest rated fire services (expenditures per capita, response time, "professional" status of firefighters, breadth of services and training provided). Resident opinion commonly reflects objective performance data but is an important measure on its own. NRC principals have written, "If you collect trash three times a day but residents think that your trash haul is lousy, you still have a problem." Survey Sampling "Sampling" refers to the method by which households were chosen to receive the survey. All households within the City of Ramsey were eligible to participate in the survey. A list of all households was represented by a United States Postal Service listing of housing units within the zip codes serving Ramsey Since some of the zip codes that serve the City of Ramsey households may also serve addresses that lie outside of the community, the exact geographic location of each housing unit was compared to community boundaries using the most current municipal boundary file (updated on a quarterly basis) and addresses located outside of the City of Ramsey boundaries were removed from consideration. To choose the 1,200 survey recipients, a systematic sampling method was applied to the list of households previously screened for geographic location. Systematic sampling is a procedure whereby a complete list of all possible items is culled, selecting every Nth one until the appropriate amount of items is selected. Multi -family housing units were over sampled as residents of this type of housing typically respond at lower rates to surveys than do those in single-family housing units. Figure i displays a map of the households selected to receive the survey. In general, because of the random sampling techniques used, the displayed sampling density will closely mirror the overall housing unit density (which may be different from the population density). While the theory of probability assumes no bias in selection, there may be some minor variations in practice (meaning, an area with only 15% of the housing units might be sampled at an actual rate that is slightly above or below that). An individual within each household was selected using the birthday method. The birthday method selects a person within the household by asking the "person whose birthday has most recently passed" to complete the questionnaire. The underlying assumption in this method is that day of birth has no relationship to the way people respond to surveys. This instruction was contained in the cover letter accompanying the questionnaire. 29