The Surveys Usefulness is Dubious
By JP(JP)
Setting up a booth in Leucadia is likely to produce different results than if you sampled in new Encinitas. People in Leucadia are keenly aware of how behind the City is in providing adequate infrastructure. …

JP’s suggested survey design is what is called a convenience sample. If you are looking to get very accurate estimates of what the whole population thinks, a convenience sample can be problematic and misleading. This is especially likely if your convenience sample picks up people who are a poor representation of the whole population. Setting up a booth in Leucadia is likely to produce different results than if you sampled in new Encinitas. People in Leucadia are keenly aware of how behind the City is in providing adequate infrastructure.

Another poster who snipped at [Mary] Fleener alludes to the gold standard in sample surveys. This is the simple random sample. If you sample randomly, your estimates will be unbiased and your margin of errors will be meaningful (if you calculate them correctly).

If the City’s population of interest is all adults in the City, the City’s survey does NOT meet the criteria to be described as a simple random sample. In a simple random sample all adults would have the same chance of being sampled. The City’s survey has MANY nuances that move it away from being a simple random sample. This only matters if the bias is large enough to matter.

For the most part, it doesn’t matter much to me if the estimates from the survey are mildly or moderately biased. Why? Even if we did a census of the entire population and I had the true values (not estimates that you get from a sample survey) I don’t see much utility from having this information. Even if they were valuable, we need a council who are going to act on what they find.

When voting 4-0 to spend the $10k on this survey there was no discussion on how the council adjusted or acted on the previous results. The survey’s usefulness is dubious and its lack of use clear.

Here are some of the questions included in the survey:

1. Is Encinitas a good place to live? My view: regardless of the “sentiment” shouldn’t we be constantly struggling to make it an even better place to be?

2. Are you satisfied with fire protection services? Fortunately, only a small percentage of people have needed to call upon the fire department and even that small sub population has little means to base an evaluation of the service. Just because lots of people say they are satisfied with the fire department doesn’t mean they should be satisfied.

3. Are you satisfied with trash services? Well, trash collection is pretty straight forward and something everyone has some experience with . In the last survey only 71% said they were very satisfied. The council thinks we have very good service and I don’t think they are going to revisit the trash contract. Think about this too, something is way wrong with trash service long before a large proportion of the population have complaints. The city is better off spending resources letting citizens know how to inform the city of grievances, making a record of those grievances (and remediation) are archived, and ensuring nothing is structurally wrong with the service. The way I see it is that things may need to be changed even if only a small proportion of the population are affected/aware of a problem.

4. Is the City going in the right direction? Should peoples’ responses be weighted the same regardless of whether or not they have been following the city activities closely or even read the paper? Most people can’t name a single council person.

5. If there were one thing the City of Encinitas could do to improve your quality of life, what would that be? There were some interesting responses. Each of the following were responses from a single respondent: 1) “Keep Leucadia Funky” 2) Make city a car-free zone, 3) Get a library. Only one out of 300 said library! The library was one of the city’s biggest expenditures last year (taking us deeper in debt). I would conclude that the results of this survey item are not guiding the council actions.

Stop paying to have it asked?

The top two responses to this question: 1) Stop/control growth / development & reducing / managing traffic / congestion. These two got 59% of all the responses.

Let’s not waste any more money on surveys that are not useful and/or used.