Our Community Survey: Residents Still Think Troy Is Headed In The Wrong Direction

Survey still shows interesting data points in how community is perceived

For over a year, 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, continue 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?

Of all the surveys that this publication has put forward, it had the lowest participation at 37 respondents in the City of Troy; the survey gave us 10 respondents from other communities. Regardless of the participants, a smaller portion believes the nation is on the right track, with 24% expressing positive sentiments, down 4% in two months. Like the nation, residents also have a dim outlook when it comes to the State of Ohio. 32% think the state is heading in the right direction, while 38% 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. In our July survey, 59% of respondents believe our community is headed in the wrong direction, up from 57% two months ago; a majority of participants have felt the city has been heading in the wrong direction since last September. Of note, 8% of respondents were unsure of the community’s direction, whereas only 32% of respondents felt our community was headed in the right direction.

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 30%, 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 26% 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. 35% of respondents are either not confident or somewhat not confident that things will improve. 26% of respondents are confident or somewhat confident that things will improve, this number is lower than the 31% 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. 61% of respondents love their community, and another 25% of respondents like their community. 11% expressed no emotional attachment to the community and 3% show dislike towards the hometown.

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 May survey, 37 respondents participated, and the survey has a 16% 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 half of our respondents (48%) were over age 65. Nearly one in three respondents (30%) were aged 55-64. Only 11% of our respondents were under age 44.

• For those that answered, most of our respondents were female (51%).

• 84% 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 changing? Our paid subscribers are more than welcome to leave their ideas and insights in the comment thread!

A New Way to Support This Work

Our readers and subscribers have been asking for a new way to support the work being done here at Civic Capacity! Some of our readers do not like the idea of having to sign up for another subscription service. Some of our subscribers occasionally want to give more support through a one-time transaction.

Civic Capacity is partnering with “Buy Me A Coffee” to give our readers, subscribers and friends an opportunity to give one-time support to Civic Capacity. Personally, I don’t like coffee, but I will never turn down a nice iced tea. If you feel compelled to support this effort, just click the button below.

Thanks for reading today’s Civic Capacity Newsletter! Please feel free to share this information with your friends and neighbors.

Also, please consider subscribing to our work. If you are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For less than $1 a week, you can get timely and conversational updates about the decisions that are impacting you and your community!