Lack of survey response a concern

The biggest question Prince George city council had for Dr. Shannon Wagner on Monday was one she couldn’t answer: How do we get more people to respond to the city’s annual survey on municipal services and quality of life?
“That’s a really tough question,” Wagner, the director of the Institute for Social Research and Evaluation (ISRE) at UNBC said in response to that question from Coun. Cameron Stolz. “It doesn’t seem to matter how many surveys we send out, we get back about 10 per cent. We have also found incentives don’t work, mainly because people responding value the anonymity of the survey.
“The best way might be to engage specific communities.”
However, she added, that sort of engagement could lead to a weighting of the survey towards those groups.
Wagner said the survey used randomized address labels to send out 4,500 invitations. Of these, 237 people took the on-line survey. A further 11 people requested either a mail-out of the paper version of the survey or picked it up themselves. Only two of these surveys were returned.
Another 66 people took the survey spontaneously upon being specifically asked, and 60 others did not indicate how they found out about the survey.
Wagner said the total of 363 responses from 4,500 mail-outs is about eight per cent – below the number they have had in the past.
“The response is not up to the numbers I would hope for,” she told council. “I don’t know if it’s a case of ‘survey fatigue’, but in some cases there were problems with security settings blocking access to the questions.”
This was the first year ISRE had used an online format for the survey and Wagner says things basically went well.
“There are some things we will be working on for next year, but it’s much cheaper both in terms of cost and time needed.”
On the survey itself, there were few surprises, she said.
“Satisfaction (with municipal services) hasn’t changed a lot. The top five areas people are most satisfied with are the same as they have been in the past. Fire protection is still top of the list, with some minor shuffling among the other four.”
Those include arenas, library, water supply, and aquatic centre.
Just as the top satisfaction areas remained the same, so did the bottom, with road and street maintenance being the area respondents were least happy with. The rest of the bottom five included land use planning, dust and weed control, snow control, and economic initiatives.
The widest margin in the survey came on a question about funding big projects. More than 90 per cent of those responding said the city should only enter into big projects if grants from other levels of government were confirmed.
As with the areas of municipal responsibility, the survey found people rating their quality of life in Prince George high in general, with the same specific areas as in previous surveys rating high and low.
Wagner had earlier in her presentation voiced concerns about the length of the survey, but agreed with Coun. Dave Wilbur on some other questions that could be added.
“Less than 40 per cent of the eligible voters voted in the last municipal election,” Wilbur noted. “Would it be possible to add in questions asking if people had voted in the last municipal election and, if not, why?”
Wagner agreed, saying it could be interesting to see if there was a correlation between people who responded to the survey and those who had voted in the last election.