Thanks to Community Planning Workshop, we can cross another adventure off our bucket lists—creating a survey!
Some of you may be skeptical that crafting a survey fits on a list usually reserved for sky diving or swimming with jelly fish in Palau, but the craftsmanship behind creating an effective, powerful survey tool for community participation had, for our team, previously been shrouded in appealing mystery.
Surveys are amazing because, with enough randomly selected respondents, survey results can provide the opportunity to get a representative sample of a population as a whole. For our Community Planning Workshop-Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan project, the survey results have allowed us to make recommendations that address the needs of the general population of all Lake County residents.
Drafting and Drafting and Drafting Some More
Survey creation is an immensely intricate, challenging, and curious process. Finding the fine line between asking enough questions without asking too many questions has been one of the most difficult aspects of creating our survey. We need all the useful information that we can get, but we don’t want to make the survey so long that people give up and don’t complete it. We want to know what facilities people currently enjoy and what parks or recreation opportunities they would like to have. Sounds so simple, right? It turns out it’s difficult to be comprehensive, concise, clear, and exhaustive AND keep it short! Our goal was that the whole survey would take less than 20 minutes to finish. The hard-won solution to crafting this is an iterative process of drafting and drafting and drafting some more.
Satisfied or Dissatisfied…that is the Question
The survey itself was made up of 25 questions on 8 pages—most of which are in multiple choice, ranking, or a Likert-scale format. What’s a Likert-scale? You’ve no doubt filled out one or two in various formats as seen by the example below:
Our survey also gives some opportunities for people to write in their own responses. We included a raffle ticket for a Visa gift card to incentivize people to actually take the time to complete and send the survey back to us.
Final Touches and Finishing Strong
Our Lake County Task Team members provided the final feedback once we reached draft number 9.0, and we were able to send out Survey 10.0—hopefully a perfect 10!—to Lake County residents at the end of March.
We’re not sure if the Lake County residents who received our Parks and Recreation survey spent any time thinking about the tremendous thought, planning, and testing that went into the slim questionnaire they held in their hands, but we are very sure that we will never look at a ‘simple’ survey the same way again!
About the Authors:
Kate Hammarback is a first year concurrent Master of Public Administration/Master of Business Administration student with a focus on community health and development. She enjoys looking under the hood to see how things work and working with teams to try to make things work better. Kate values CPW both for the new skills she’s learning and for the opportunity to work with one of the most beautiful counties in Oregon.
Alexis Biddle is a law student focusing on land use and is pursuing a Masters in Community and Regional Planning. He has a passion for active and public transportation and wants to promote policy related to healthy and sustainable communities. In his free time, Alexis enjoys backpacking, snowboarding, biking, and competitive stone skipping.