Our Community Survey: A Look at November's Survey Results

Residents continue to doubt the direction of the community.

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 and tend to believe that our community is headed in the wrong direction.

Where are we headed?

Participation in this survey stood at 42 respondents in the City of Troy, and the survey gave us a number of responses from other communities, which will be reported in future editions.

Regardless of the participants, 34% of our readers believe the nation is on the right track, which is the highest number our survey has recorded. However, this number still shows that 53% of respondents felt the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Like the nation, residents also have a dim outlook when it comes to the State of Ohio. 30% think the state is heading in the right direction, while 55% believe the state is headed in the wrong direction.

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 64% of respondents believe our community is headed in the wrong direction, and only 11% of respondents believed that the community is headed in the right direction; the lowest value this survey has ever recorded. Of note, 25% 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 32%, 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. 51% of respondents were do not expect to see any changes. 27% of respondents are either not confident or somewhat not confident that things will improve. Only 22% of respondents are confident or somewhat confident that things will improve, this number is lower than the 24% 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. 53% of respondents love their community, and another 34% of respondents like their community and 13% 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 November survey, 42 respondents participated, and the survey has a 15% 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 five (17%) were between 35-44. No one under age 35 responded to our survey.

• For those that answered, most of our respondents were female (52%).

• 82% of our respondents are long time residents, stating they have lived in Troy for more than 20 years. Another 11% of respondents have lived in Troy for 10–20 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!

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