New survey method seeks to hear from Philadelphia’s unheard voices.
How do cities ensure that their surveys — like seeing how well their trash and recycling pick-up program is performing across neighborhoods — is representative? How can they ensure that they hear from the hardest to reach voices (typically of the lowest incomes)?
In Philadelphia, Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research is attempting to solve that problem with BeHeardPhilly. BeHeardPhilly combines traditional polling techniques, like phone calls, with newer techniques, like social media outreach, neighborhood outreach, bus stop ads, and text message-based surveys. As Nina Hoe, BeHeardPhilly’s study director, said in a recent interview on FiveThirtyEight’s podcast, What’s The Point:
Typically in the field of survey research, minority, low-income, and transient people are referred to as, kind of, “harder to reach” populations, so that’s … the core of what BeHeardPhilly is — making sure that all of these harder to reach populations have the opportunity to participate and have their voices heard.
BeHeardPhilly’s eventual goal is to have a statistically representative panel of several thousand Philadelphians (who have opted-in to the program) who can indefinitely be called upon to answer survey requests from the Philadelphia government and nonprofits. For now, as Hoe says, BeHeardPhilly is in a “very experimental phase and [we are] trying to do everything we can to try and test ourselves and our panel members.”
Listen to Nina Hoe’s interview on FiveThirtyEight’s What’s The Point here and learn more about BeHeardPhilly here.
