WS - E - Conducting Community Surveys

street configurations and conditions; by topography, such as canyons; by development, such as proximity to retail areas, and by many other features. Modifications to incorporate measures of planned police initiatives An important element for modifying the questionnaire is to incorporate measures of planned police initiatives. Say, for example, the police plan to mount an extensive public information effort to encourage residents to keep windows and doors shut. If this type of effort is planned, a baseline question can be included in the survey to determine what proportion of residents currently keep windows and doors shut. This baseline measure will then provide a before-and-after measure of the impact of the police public safety measure. This research design, known as a pre-test post-test, provides excellent information about the impact of prevention or intervention efforts. Crackdowns on gangs, street-level drug dealing, truancy, public drinking and a host of other community-policing initiatives can be well documented by using this design. Modifications to survey should be consistent and neutral Modifying the questionnaire requires care and attention to question construction and response options. In general, questions should be neutral and consistent with other questions in the survey questionnaire. Response options should also be consistent with the responses in the questionnaire. For example, if concern about gangs in your jurisdiction is a major issue, the survey may be modified to ask the respondent: "How fearful are you about gangs in your city (and/or your neighborhood)?" Since response options to similar questions in the survey are worded as (1) Very fearful (2) Somewhat fearful (3) Not very fearful (4) Not at all fearful this same sequence of responses should be used for the new question. Who ya gonna call? The critical issue of sample size Once the survey has been modified to be consistent with the goals and objectives in a particular jurisdiction, attention must turn to the selection of respondents. By far, the most common question of police conducting community surveys is "How many people must I survey?" The answer to this question relates to the goals and objectives of your survey. In this section, we will provide some general guidelines for decision making. We mentioned previously that police surveys are often criticized because they are not scientific or probability samples, thus their findings are not representative of anything in particular. Investing the time to develop a defensible sampling strategy 10 A Practical Guide for Police