Laurie McKinsey, one of our new recent Guest posters, has put together a quick survey.
Everybody’s been asking what all the candidate’s opinions are on a range of current topics. Let’s turn this around and ask you what your opinions are on many of the issues of the day. Laurie will tally the results and report back.
So,… I don’t know how many will have the same problem, but I had the same issue with this survey as I had with most of the surveys that I was ever sent when I was running for office. Namely, for every question that provides options, none of the options listed was one I would choose, and I could think of several unlisted answers I would prefer.
Just as a suggestion, could we have the same questions, but remove the options and allow for open response? I would find that to be a much more useful measure of what people are actually thinking. Having structured options like in the survey here is misleading and extraordinarily limiting in terms of gauging the community’s priorities.
Very surprised the survey fails to ask the important question regarding reducing the size of the City Council. Newton voters want the size of the Council reduced but time and time again, Councilors refuse to offer a concrete plan to do so.
I’d amend Chris’s suggestion and propose offering “Other” as a choice, with a space to specify what the other is. Or, alternatively if that’s not feasible, “none of the above” which at least allows you to see whether 5% or 50% of people are unhappy with the choices offered.
There must be an echo in here.
It took two days since I mentioned the probability of raising the CPA tax from 1-3 percent for the trial balloon to show up on this survey. So much revenue to be confiscated, and so many things to spend it on….
@Paul Green – We’ll call it the Green New Tax
The survey says the cost of the city buying Webster Woods is projected to be $17m. Who is projecting the $17m? Has this been said publicly? My back of the envelope calculations are much higher.
Good suggestions! I’ll add these where in places where the form will allow it. There is already an open response form at the end, but I’ll add it in other places as well. It won’t affect the 82 responses we’ve already received, but we can capture some good ideas on the rest.
@Jeffrey Pontiff: The numbers were posted recently on the mayor’s newsletter.
Everybody can comment as much as they want about the wording of these questions, but as a professional pollster, my interest is in who’s taking the survey. Self-selected V14 readers only? If that’s the case then this survey will be representative of those V14 voters only, and as we all know, V14 opinions are hardly representative of how the city as a whole views things. So I’m curious to know if this survey is going to be taken by anyone other than V14 voters, and I’m also curious to know how the data is going to be processed to make sure all wards and demographic groups are appropriately included in order to make the survey mean something. Otherwise, frankly, this is a fun idea that means absolutely nothing.
What Gerry said. Also:
I appreciate Laurie’s initiative, bus as some folks know, I used to post a lot of reader polls on Village 14. I stopped posting them because — while the intention was to jump start a conversation and maybe hear from the non-commentating visitors here — they were so easy to game. So really all it tells you is which group of people have the most time on their hands to take the survey over and over and over and over and over.
It will be decidedly not scientific. Having said that, since it’s not about a particular hot button issue, I doubt too many people will take the time to take it multiple times. (we have 112 responses so far)
In order to increase the diversity of opinions, please share it to various google groups, facebook pages and list servs that you are on! I won’t give hints of the results so far (there are some things that surprised me!), but I promise to publish the full results next week.
Can someone add this survey to the Next Door Newton site on the south side of Newton? I can only add it for the North side, and 25% of respondents are coming from there, which is great, but I’d love to get more south side responses as well. I also added it to West Newton google groups, but don’t have access to other neighborhood google groups, so if you do, please post the link!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSebvBo-AV6iVr_YkP-goswm1rcQ1Sr_spw2vmRLtJ5T1p_Taw/viewform
A survey that ends with asking if the survey taker wants to take the survey again really tells you very little.
Most of my answers were not listed in the available answers to select from. I did fill out a few of the “other” answers but didn’t take the time on others. My answers aren’t that off base with what many people want so it seems like most of them would have been included.
For example, on the Newton Senior center questions, all answers had to do with the terribly named NewCal center with no answer that included just a new Senior Center.
The questions about funds available for city contract and city employee pay did not include pay for city electeds.
The questions about zoning had very specific answers – none of which I wanted. I also don’t like new zoning referred as a “redesign” because that sounds like a socially motivated design. I did take the time to write in my answer to that one.
I want to echo what Greg and Gerry note about the methodology issues. The survey will collect opinions about a lot of topics, but the responses won’t accurately reflect the opinion of the Newton population. No amount of circulating it on various discussion boards will make it representative. Thus, the information that you plan to summarize and report will systematically exclude people who are not online or engaged in those online forums. The NewCal questions strike me as ones that are apt to misrepresent community opinions.
@Marti, valid points. I added a section at the end of each question for people to write in their thoughts if their preferred option is not listed. Will report those too. Unfortunately, it won’t apply to the first half of people who took the survey, but at least we will capture those thoughts with the latter half.
As mentioned before, this will not be scientific, and will have a large margin for error, but it should be an interesting snapshot to discuss.
Laurie, the fact that this survey is unscientific means that there’s no margin of error associated — it’s simply meaningless. Good try, most of us appreciate the enthusiasm, but please do us all a favor and cease and desist on this. Don’t report “results.” There won’t be any “interesting snapshot” to discuss because the data isn’t representative of anything. Pretending that the data means something and looking to discuss it as if it’s something worth discussing will just confuse readers into thinking it’s real. It’s not. Don’t foist that disservice on Newton. Please stop!
Laurie, I appreciate your taking the time to assemble a group of questions on issues in Newton and putting this survey together. It’s commendable that you want to know what the residents of Newton are thinking on these issues. I am sure everyone here on V14 and all around the city would like to know what most residents think about several issues.
Unfortunately there is no way, except maybe an unbiased poll taken by professional poll takers but I have my doubts about that too, to gather that information.
I would wager that most residents of Newton are caught up in their busy lives, just as my grown kids are, and pay no attention at all to the noise going on in local issues. I know that some definitely do take that time but other than political junkies, those very interested in one or two particular issues and we older folks who have more time, no one else will even know there is a survey to be taken.
Even on the listservs, discussion groups and google groups I belong to, it’s mostly the same people who engage in discussions.
So it pains me to say after you have worked hard to gather opinions, “data” from this survey, as Gerry says, “doesn’t represent anything” and will just rile up and confuse readers.
The good news is that we have a really meaningful and statistically important poll coming up that everyone should pay attention to. It’s called Election Day.
@Marti, @Gerry – There’s no harm to any of this so long as no one is flogging the results of Laurie’s poll as “the voice of the populace”.
Here we all are posting our own opinions on a community blog. None of us speak for the community. We’re just voicing our own thoughts on various issues of the day. If Laurie collects a set of opinions from Village14 readers and aggregates the results, its no more or less helpful or harmful then everything else on Village14.
I do agree that it should be clearly represented as what it is – a totally non-scientific exercise that bears no relation to an official poll.
Now that’s just my opinion and I don’t want to speak for all the other Village14 readers so I’ve designed a quick little poll on the subject .
@Jerry: Of course you realize that your poll about polls is also unscientific!
But just to find out if others agree with me, I’ve created this.
I get that a few people would like to quash the poll for the reasons cited above, which have some validity. However, over 200 Newton voters have taken the time to answer 13 fairly detailed questions so far, and have asked to see the results. In a few more days, there will probably be quite a few more, and will represent close to 1% of the people who voted in the last municipal election (maybe more), which by many polling definitions is statistically significant, though admittedly not definitive. I am also in the process of looking through all 200+ submissions to see if any look identical, and so far have found none. Can’t promise that someone isn’t coming on every few hours to slip in a new response amongst the others in order to evade my eagle eyes, but I doubt there is much of it.
Having said that, this will not be purported to be a professionally done, scientific poll or a road map for what elected officials should do. It is meant as a conversation starter. So far, most of the answers are probably close to what you would expect, but some may be surprise, and will create some good debate.
However, I get it’s not my sandbox, so it’s your call.
I for one would like to see the results, especially any unusual “Other” responses. These results are not really less (or more) valid than the online input collected by, for example, the Hello Washington Street process.
@Laurie, I get it — you have put in time and effort to create the survey and to distribute it. It would seem a waste to stop it now. So, do whatever you like.
But since we are heading into election season, maybe it might be beneficial to V14 if @Gerry wrote a post about polling and how to critically evaluate poll data? What @Gerry’s post might explain is that there is a science to conducting surveys.
@Laurie, your comment “In a few more days, there will probably be quite a few more, and will represent close to 1% of the people who voted in the last municipal election (maybe more), which by many polling definitions is statistically significant” is NOT true. That was the point I tried to make in an earlier post. You can’t have confidence in the results because of the convenience sampling. I’m sorry if that is disappointing and I hope this won’t diminish your enthusiasm for future posts on V14 – you add a lot.
What this “poll” will show is a sampling of V14 or any other forum that the survey was sent to. In no way does it represent any more than that nor does is represent the Newton electorate as a whole regardless of whether you were able to reach a 1% level. The sampling is what matters….if I polled the Sierra Club about environmental issues and was able to get enough responses to claim I received responses equal to 2% of the electorate, I could not claim that the poll represented the electorate as a whole. I would have a poll of the Sierra club and a margin of error of the Sierra Club population only. In order to apply a margin of error for the entire electorate you would need to have a random sampling of the Newton electorate…I would suggest that V14 is not a random sampling of the Newton electorate.
I agree with Beth Dugan, in that although I can see where you are coming from Laurie – your math seems logical to you, and maybe others – but it simply isn’t. Making sense of the responses that even scientific data polling represents is a lot more complicated than that – unscientific polling with no parameters or any other statistical measures and that can be taken many times answering differently each time by anyone, has no statistical significance at all. No margin of error.
Just because you get a response rate of a certain number, you cannot correlate that number with the number of people who voted in the last election. These numbers represent entirely different groups of people. And there is no way to know if your responders are also voters.
Having seen the chaos caused by others submitting survey results similar to yours, I hope you don’t publish your answers unless you post just the out of the box and uniques ideas submitted in the other column as a conversation starter. Some people will believe your results represent something significant if the answers are skewed to their way of thinking and use them to make a case that these answers represent more than what they do.
So not filling this out. Questions lead to a desired outcome. Didn’t even bother reading after the first few questions.
Cringe worth. Ugh.
Matt:
Same problems as the polls put out by the area councils that certain folks on this forum keep bringing up. Completely non scientific and completely able to be gamed and filled out multiple times.
Fun to fill out. But I wish folks would stop using them for anything political or to make policy.
The turnout for local elections is so low even that “poll” is questionable.
Poll: pick your favorite color
1. Black
2. White
3. Red
“Newton’s favorite color (one of the above….only)”
Those who have had the pleasure (or displeasure) of my rants on Development over the past 18 months will not be surprised about my SUSPICION of the INTENT of this survey based on the first few questions alone.
Did not even bother to read the rest of the questions.
And any attempts to tout the results as even remotely reflective of Newton or Newton Voters will be met with great resistance. Please stop.