WS - E - Conducting Community Surveys

This type of table is available as a standardized report with the CVS software. Tables can be generated by the demographic variables such as age, gender and race. The technical manual provides guidance on how to use the software to carry out these tasks. More sophisticated analyses Frequencies and crosstabulations tell most police agencies much of what they want to know from community surveys. We have not discussed significance testing, the criteria for determining the likelihood that an observed relationship is due to chance. You may want to evaluate significance of findings to establish support for an observed relationship. The mathematical formula used to estimate significance depends on a host of factors, including the size of the sample or sub-sample. In addition to frequencies and crosstabulations, more sophisticated analysis may be used by jurisdictions with the interest and ability to do so. For example, surveys which opt to collect location information from residents (such as zipcode or neighborhood) may be able to use GIS systems to map response categories. Analyses should also be framed so that replication of findings from year to year will generate results which provide meaningful comparisons over time. Conclusion Surveys of the public can provide valuable information to police managers and law enforcement policy makers. There are some types of information, such as citizen attitudes and the volume of unreported crime, that cannot be gathered in any other way. This guide has introduced the basic concepts and procedures needed to undertake a community survey. The survey software provided by COPS and BJS incorporates some of the best practices available, thus making the process simpler. Nevertheless, a competent and valid survey, particularly of rare events such as criminal victimization, is a difficult and resource-intensive undertaking. If the sample is too small, there can be little confidence in the results even if it is a random sample. If an important segment of the population refuses to answer the questions or cannot be reached by telephone then making population estimates from your sample is highly problematic. The software and this guide focus on simple random sampling which is appropriate for telephone samples in which nothing is known about the respondents. For many circumstances, simple random sampling is more expensive than other more complex sampling strategies. We strongly recommend that you discuss the substantive problem you want to investigate with a trained survey researcher before starting your project. 20 A Practical Guide for Police