Tag: Alexis Biddle Uo Law student land use Masters in Community and Regional Planning.

On a Scale of 1 to 5, How Much Fun is Creating a Survey?

Posted on by Julia Havens

Alexis Biddle Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning Workshop

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:

Likert-Survey-Example

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: 

Alexis Biddle Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning Workshop Kate HammarbackKate 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 Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning Workshop Alexis BiddleAlexis 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.

 

Asking Questions and Taking an Inventory

Posted on by Julia Havens

Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopThe Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan Team (through the Community Planning Workshop) has set out to develop a vision for parks and recreation in Lake County, Oregon. Our intrepid group of public administration and community and regional planning students will be working with communities in Lake County to understand their health and recreational needs and values. We even have a County task team with local knowledge and expertise to help guide our recommendations.

Understanding the context of planning parks and recreation in Lake County requires that we take an inventory of the current parks system and the role that it plays in the community and local economy. From concept to deliverable, this project involves: researching social and economic trends, interviewing stakeholders, surveying community members, holding community meetings, interpreting the results of this research, and, finally, creating a Parks and Recreation Master Plan based on our findings.

Turns out, there is a lot to learn about a place you’ve never been!

Alexis Biddle Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopWe’ve learned about Lake County’s geography – it has the highest elevation city in Oregon! –; populations of towns – hint: they are small –; demographics – apparently, it’s a great place to retire! –; seasonal swings in employment – farm towns vary a lot! –, and tourism.

From my experience, having grown up in a larger city, focusing on the economic trends in a rural county made me realize how important each and every job is to the local economy. Gaining or losing even ten jobs can make a huge impact in the prosperity of towns in rural Oregon.

From the Lake County Treasurer and our project advisor, Anne Crumrine, we learned about Red Rock Biofuels planned biomass plant for Lakeview, Oregon. The plant will create fuel from logging debris for the military. More importantly, this development will likely create needed jobs in Lake County. This project and developments like it will drive the growth that shapes the demand for parks and recreation.

Alexis Biddle Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopMy teammate Rory and I were so excited to visit Lake County that we went for sneak peak to Fort Rock. The eroding center of a volcano was like nothing I had ever seen – a piece of living geology still speaking the story of the Earth. We knew that this story needed to be shared and are excited to let others in on secrets like this in Lake County.

We are currently in the process of conducting stakeholder interviews. These interviews are preparing us for our first round of community conversations in February. During that trip we’ll get to taste even more wonders of Lake County’s park system.

That’s right, it’s our job to go to the park.

 

Alexis Biddle Lake County Parks and Recreation Master Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the Author: 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.