Responses to Community Feedback

Join Now!

Here at Community Insight we value highly all the feedback we receive. It is only through the conscientious efforts of the community that this portal will ever become a truly trusted source for discovering the will of the people in our valley. We created this page as a place where we can highlight and respond to the feedback we receive.

If you would like to give feedback about a survey or any aspect of Community Insight, please send an email to feedback@communityinsight.com.

Topic: As part of the Vision for the Valley survey community members were asked to identify which of a few issues they thought was the least important and which was the most important. Some people thought this didn't make any sense because they were all important and it seemed impossible to choose one over another.
Response:This gets right at the heart of why we decided to start Community Insight. We asked people to choose the most and least important community issues so that we could prioritize them. We recognize that there just aren't enough resources to tackle every important issue at the same time. So someone will have to prioritize and those are tough decisions. But those are the kind of tough decisions our government and community leaders are going to have to make. So we thought those leaders should have the direct feedback of community members about those priorities. By publishing the community's choices on these difficult issues we feel we can hold our leaders more accountable to the will of the people they represent.
Topic: Several community members who participated in the Vision for the Valley survey thought there needed to be an open-ended question near the end of the survey where people could freely give their thoughts about the survey.
Response: We decided to ask for some open-ended feedback right near the beginning of the survey because we wanted to get people initial ideas before we were presented specific issues for evaluation. But in retrospect we agree that it would be nice to be able to share some thoughts at the end of the survey after considering all the issues. We are planning to incorporate such an open-ended response into the next survey we run. Thanks so much for helping us improve this process.
Topic: Some survey takers have expressed concern about divulging certain demographic information about themselves during a survey. A few of the most cited concerns were about ethnicity and income level.
Response: We understand these concerns about giving out demographic information. Anytime people are asked to reveal identifying characteristics about themselves, they need to trust that the information will not be used improperly. First we think it's good to be completely open about why we gather the information we do. There are two main reasons that this research requires demographic information:
  1. We want the results of the survey to be representative of the community. To accomplish this, we need to balance the data to census figures. Thus the only demographic information we collect are things that would be asked in the census. In this way we can use a method of weighting the data so that people in the valley with certain characteristics (gender, ethnicity, income level, etc.) are represented proportionately to their actual numbers as reported in the census. This is how most scientific research is done and without it the survey results would not have much credibility.

  2. We also want to be able to report the results of the survey back to community members in a way that is meaningful and interesting. If we collected no demographics at all, then we would only be able to report that on average the entire valley responded one way or the other. But having the demographics means we can report that people with certain characteristics or in certain general areas responded a certain way, while others did not.

POPULUS, the creator of Community Insight, is an established research organization and is committed to never divulging individual answers to anyone or any entity. We abide by research guidelines established by the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO). We only look at the answers to demographic questions in aggregate form, which means we never look at or reveal individual responses.

We hope that the Community Insight initiative will earn trust among more and more of the community as we move forward with our goal to do research of the people, by the people and for the people. That is why we are committed to never taking any outside advertising or allowing any commercial influence that could even be perceived to bias the research results in any direction. We simply want to report on what the community thinks about the topics they are most interested in.

Join Now!