September 2017 - Parks & Recreation - 26

Member to Member

Overcoming the Flaws of Needs Assessments
The new realm of big data
By Ananda Mitra, Ph.D.

U

sing survey questionnaires with multiple-choice questions has been the
traditional form of doing needs assessments in the recreation industry.
The process involves collecting attitudes, behaviors, needs and demographics information from the citizens served by public recreation agencies. The impetus of " positivist " social science has been to rely on this form of data
collection, and related statistical quantitative analysis, to delve into the intricacies of
what a community truly thinks about leisure and recreation opportunities and the associated needs. This is the best method available to decision makers for planning the
future of recreation in the communities they serve.
Entire master plans are designed and
executed based on the numerical data
that serves to encapsulate the narrative of a community. Yet, the decisions
made using such data often result in investments that might not prove to be as
successful as expected. This is often because the only voice the community had
in building this narrative comes from

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pre-defined questions. And, those questions allowed for responses measured on
a five- or seven-point scale with terms
such as " strongly agree " in response to
statements that the planners and architects crafted to the best of their ability,
without discovering the nuances of the
narrative that defines the character of a
community.

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Surveys and Public Meetings
This method, although widely used by
many industries, lacks the ability to capture the details of the narrative of the
community. Consequently, decisions
made based on this survey data are often flawed. Consider, for example, the
presidential polling data in the United
States that has, on several occasions,
completely missed the opinion of the
nation. Sometimes, the numerical data
is accompanied by data gathered in public meetings. The data gathered in this
forum usually is statistically biased and
only garners unreliable data. These public meetings attract the vocal minority
- the " squeaky wheels " of the community if you will - who then become the
representation of the silent majority who
are not at these meetings.
Thus, there are two issues with the
data from surveys and public meetings. Either the authentic narrative of a
community is inaccessible because the
" voice " of the community is reduced to
numeric responses from " randomly selected " representatives of the community who are expected to respond with the
numbers on multiple-choice questions,
or the generalized voice of the community is hijacked by the people who attend the public meetings. To add to the
confusion, unscrupulous researchers can
effectively mask response rates - percentage of the randomly selected sample
who completed a questionnaire - and
hypnotize recreation professionals with
arbitrary promised numbers, such as
" 500 completed responses, " with nonresponse error skyrocketing to 90 percent
and higher. Not only is the data incomplete because emotions are reduced to
September 2017 - Parks & Recreation

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