/youthsurvey

Primary LanguageHTML

City Resident Survey Theming

Each year, the city of Durham and Durham county assess resident satisfaction with a number of governmental services, from libraries to public transportation and public education through their resident satisfaction surveys (RSS). In both surveys, the Office on Youth (OOY) asks respondents: "What can the City and County do to make sure that all children reach their full potential and thrive?"

My main deliverable during my intership with the OOY was to theme responses and develop recommendations that honor Durham residents' feedback. By doing so, the OOY can provide youth service and programming that best support young people in the City and County.

Methodology

In this report, the survey results were sorted through two stages: string matching and qualitative theming. The first stage matched words like "school" and "bus" to large themes "education and "public transportation." By doing so, the string matching drastically reduced the labor needed for sorting themes and created a reproducible process for future analyses. Qualitative theming accounted for errors produced by string matching (i.e. "salary" can refer to increasing teacher's salaries, parents' salaries, etc.), and helped inform subthemes. Responses that did not provide a specific answer to the question or did not provide one that neatly sorted into a category are listed as miscellaneous.

Highlights

Personal Reflections

  • A question that reappeared throughout my work with the OOY was: How do youth and young people enter conversations about public policy? The RSS limits responses to adults, meaning that their answers capture what adults believe that children need, rather than what children believe they need. As a supplement to this question, analyses can consider findings from youth-centered projects like the OOY's Durham Youth Listening Project.

  • Secondly, analysis of residential surveys by governmental agencies, nonprofits, and journalists often limit their analyses to what can be quantitatively measured. For example, the 2014 survey garnered state attention based on the high percentage of Durhamites that said they liked living in the city.