Our Community Survey: A Look at January's Survey Results
For over a year and a half, this publication has conducted reader surveys every other month; these results present a nuanced picture of civic engagement, awareness, and optimism within our community. Our survey, administered last month, continues to show trends that show that residents aren’t necessarily overly optimistic or pessimistic about the community and tend to believe that our community is headed in the wrong direction.
Where are we headed?
Participation in this survey stood at 53 respondents in the City of Troy, this is the largest number of participants in this survey since last May.
In terms of the data, 27% of our readers believe the nation is on the right track, a retreat from November, when 34% of our readers believed the nation was on the right track. In addition, 54% of respondents felt the nation is headed in the wrong direction, which is a nearly identical number to November at 53%. Residents have a slightly brighter outlook when it comes to the State of Ohio; 31% think the state is heading in the right direction, while 26% believe the state is headed in the wrong direction; 43% are unsure, which is the highest percentage that our survey has ever recorded.
The percentage of individuals that are not optimistic about our community’s direction continues to be a majority of respondents. Our current survey shows that 56% of respondents believe our community is headed in the wrong direction, and only 16% of respondents believed that the community is headed in the right direction; that last numbers shows a small improvement of 4 points since November. Of note, 29% of respondents were unsure of the community’s direction. The chart below shows how these numbers have changed since our first survey administered last Summer.
Civic Awareness and Hope for the Future
Awareness levels about civic issues show a strong minority of residents who are extremely aware, currently standing at 28%, suggesting there is still work to be done to have more civic engagement, which happens to be the overriding goal of this publication. However, this number improved from 24% over the past two months.
Confidence in positive changes within the hometown shows nearly a balanced picture. 38% of respondents were do not expect to see any changes. 32% of respondents are either not confident or somewhat not confident that things will improve. Only 30% of respondents are confident or somewhat confident that things will improve, this number is higer than the 22% that was reported two months ago.
The survey also asked about the respondents’ emotional connection to the community, and the answers continue to a strong emotional attachment to the community. 49% of respondents love their community, and another 45% of respondents like their community and only 2% expressed no emotional attachment to the community.
Open Ended Questions and Answers
The survey also asked residents to provide answers to open-ended questions on what they believed to be the most positive attributes in the community and some of the biggest challenges facing the community. The responses were pooled into word clouds which shows the relative strength of the answers provided.
Attributes
Challenges
For the January survey, with the 53 respondents that participated, and this survey has a 13% margin of error at a 95% confidence level.
A Note on Demographics
As part of this survey, we asked demographic questions of our those that were wiling to answer those questions. Here are some demographic highlights of those that completed this survey:
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of our respondents were over age 65. Nearly one in three (30%) were between 45-64. No one under age 35 responded to our survey.
For those that answered, most of our respondents were female (51%).
79% of our respondents are long time residents, stating they have lived in Troy for more than 20 years. Another 9% of respondents have lived in Troy for 10–20 years. 12% of respondents reported living in town less than 10 years.
What Do You Think?
Is there anything in this survey that you find interesting? Do you think our community is changing? How do you think it is changing? Our paid subscribers are more than welcome to leave their ideas and insights in the comment thread!
Check out our New YouTube Channel!
Our goal with the Civic Capacity YouTube Channel is to be a centralized location where residents can watch videos of local government meetings in action and also provide comments and insights. You can check out the channel here!
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